Do you regularly experience lousy quality of service with your wireless provider? Does it seem like your calls get dropped a lot? It may be less about errors or infrastructure failure on the part of your carrier and more about what kind of customer you are.
According to a recent article in the Times of India, some wireless providers are using data mining and business intelligence solutions to assign wireless customers a “customer score” based on the value of the customer relationship. High-scoring customers receive better service than low-scoring customers, seeing fewer dropped calls and higher bandwidth, for example. High-scoring customers may even be waiting less time on hold for call center representatives.
While the practice has been identified as routine by Indian carriers Bharti Airtel, Vodafone (News - Alert) India and Idea Cellular, industry experts say the practice is widespread and may be happening in most other large wireless companies.
Sudipta Sen, chief executive of business intelligence solutions provider SAS (News - Alert) Institute told the Times of India that companies today regularly assign each customer with a score, based on their lifetime value to the company.
"For example, globally, a customer with a high score will have automated call collection,” said Sen. “The wait will be less for a premium customer."
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Data mining and analytics – something more companies are engaging in thanks to cloud-based solutions that mean they don’t have to store the data on site – are enabling companies to “classify” and “score” customers like never before, assigning perks to the high-value customers and routing lower-value customers to channels with fewer resources.
Sandeep Girotra, the country head in India for Nokia Solutions and Networks, which provides the network for Bharti Airtel (News - Alert), told the Times that operators can now selectively channel network capacity to each customer if it chooses.
"Operators are being able to get insights in near real-time about customers and offering services depending on their value to the network,” said Girotra.
A Vodafone spokesperson noted that service is never the same for every customer, regardless of industry. This is particularly true with credit cards or financial services.
"So, also it is true for telecom,” said the spokesperson.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson