Elevate competitor analysis with the power of AI

The telco landscape today is more demanding than ever and fierce with competition. As most leaders know, staying vigilant and aware of what competitors are doing to attract new customers (and potentially poach yours!) is critical to staying on the front foot. However, competitor analysis can be hard and, until now, it has always been a high-cost and labour-intensive process.

Thankfully, advancements in technology have changed all of this, allowing teams to automate processes and collect data far more efficiently. What’s more, it’s now possible to collect the data and use it in a way so it can be consumed by AI models. This is the real secret sauce, and leaders who take advantage of this now will be the ones who come out on top. Read on to explore this topic.

Attracting new customers:the art of the acquisition offer

Telcos are under constant pressure to attract new customers and build their base while also ensuring existing customers remain happy and loyal. This relies on strong acquisition offers (and intelligent retention strategies) that stand out in a heavily saturated market. Achieving this, however, is a balancing act that is not without its challenges.

Because it’s not as simple as having the lowest price or offering an enticing deal like ‘half price for the first 6 months’. Acquisition offers that are too strong can easily have a reverse effect, either driving spin (customers leaving and re-joining on a new offer) or increasing churn. On top of that, going too low in price or too extreme on deals will eat into your margins.

The real goal for telcos is to create appealing acquisition offers that not only outclass the competitors but also work to benefit the financial performance of the business. But how can acquisition and retention teams identify the right time, place, and price for an offer? It’s a difficult and time-consuming task, particularly when there’s so much competitor, customer, and campaign data to look at, consider, and analyse. And this is exactly why larger telcos have almost always had dedicated teams focussed on gathering and analysing that competitor intelligence. The data these teams gather is then provided to senior executives (and, sometimes acquisition and retention managers) to help them in making more informed strategic decisions.

While beneficial, these dedicated teams are expensive and a luxury not feasible for challenger brands with smaller budgets. Even the larger telcos are having to shift away from this approach as purse strings get tighter in today’s uncertain economy. Moreover, the real value today is not just in capturing the data. It’s about being able to harness it and make effective moves off the back of it in real time. And that is where AI comes in.

Through a combination of data, analytics, people, and processes, this kind of competitive or contextual data can now be converted from unstructured text into organised data that is ready to be turned into machine-readable features to be used by AI models. It’s a game-changer.

One of the things that makes SourseAI’s decision intelligence platform, Atlas, so unique and powerful is that we’ve been collecting and learning from this type of data for some time – it’s already being used by our AI models alongside customer data points. This means our customers are able to use competitor behaviour within predictions. For example, it allows a brand to know that a price-sensitive customer who has recently joined Telco X from Telco T will be at risk because Telco T is running an incredibly aggressive acquisition offer.

Before AI, the delay in collecting, processing, and visualising data created a lag effect meaning telcos could not respond quickly. In a lot of cases, the damage to performance was done, before the data analysis was completed. But times have changed and SourseAI’s Atlas is proof of that.

Thanks to the exponential rate of tech and AI innovation, it is now so much faster to process data and present visualisations of volatile data. This gives teams more of the information they need to confidently make decisions on the go. Teams can also view historical data, using it to analyse competitors’ promotional cycles and predict when competitors will run future promotions and when those promotional offers will end. Imagine being able to know exactly when a competitor’s customer base is ready to re-engage with the market.

SourseAI’s Atlas, goes even deeper than this, harnessing AI to afford even more benefits. The strategic deployment of AI-powered competitor analysis is proving to be a transformative force, delivering unprecedented insights with unparalleled speed and scalability. For example, Atlas can take huge volumes of competitor data so teams have in-depth market and performance insights to guide business decision-making. Plus, competitor promotions and offers can be ingested and used to give daily updates to the business forecast.

More importantly, this data can provide a better understanding of those customers in the base most likely to churn when exposed to new competitor offers and provide richer insights as to how this might be handled. Teams can then decide if they should match the competitor’s offer or instead take a more below-the-line approach that targets high churn propensity customers.

In conclusion, it’s important to note that we are not talking about removing people from competitor analysis and strategic planning. Human oversight is indispensable in this process. However, the addition of AI and decision intelligence allows telcos to effectively plan and adjust at speed, supported by extensive data-driven evidence. It is the forward-thinking leaders who take advantage of platforms like Atlas that stand poised to gain a formidable competitive edge.