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Sitting on a Goldmine: How communications service providers can drive big revenue from data

Overview

The race to data monetization is accelerating. Accenture believes that CSPs have high value data that provides the basis to develop a significant new revenue stream. By integrating data monetization and IoT strategies, CSPs are in a premier position to address and monetize the possibilities that will arise as the IoT matures. As connected products converge with biological sensing and contextual information – data that CSPs can provide through collection of data from digital interactions – is sure to be another source of revenue.

Background

From Accenture's experience, most CSPs understand this opportunity but struggle to capitalize as execution can be challenging, given it's a completely new area relative to CSPs traditional core competencies. With the magnitude of change required, it is imperative that CSPs have a clear understanding of their most promising use cases and the elements most influential to their success. There are four uses of this data that consistently show themselves as the top key opportunity areas for CSPs:

  • Mobile marketing: By leveraging mobile network data combined with detailed customer profiles, CSPs have valuable information to better target mobile marketing in the form of advertising and couponing.

  • Physical location data for retail or outdoor marketing analysis: Mobile network data can be used to determine how customers interface with physical locations.

  • Identity management: Mobile network data can be leveraged to identify suspicious activity such as fraud.

  • Connected people management: Mobile network data can be used to better understand traffic patterns and to plan transportation and other services

Recommendations

Creating a viable revenue stream from any of these data use cases requires investment in the development of new capabilities. Some elements are familiar to CSPs. For example, most CSPs have a high level of technical competence, giving them the capability to aggregate data into a usable form to sell, despite the complexity and extreme detail of the challenge. Two areas, however, are critical and new territory for many CSPs. Getting these areas right will highly influence overall success:

  • Building an effective distribution model: Because CSPs lack a distribution model for this new line of business, a primary area of focus is determining the go-to-market strategy, including consideration of the data product the CSP wants to take to market.

  • Having a well-conceived and implemented privacy strategy: CSPs will need to gain agreement from a large base of customers to have a viable product to offer, which means they must make the opt-in process simple, embedded, and ubiquitous.