Tame the multi-SIM hydra with a razor sharp focus on customer behaviour analysis
By : Viju Nambiar
Principal Consultant, Analytics and Consulting
With Multi-SIM hydra rearing its ugly heads, the battle for customer retention is slated to get more aggressive, especially in prepaid dominant markets. It is imperative for telcos to learn the art of being nimble-footed in ensuring proactive and pre-emptive care for customers throughout the lifecycle across touch points.
Multi-SIM phenomena is posing new threats to erode the traditional revenue streams even further for telcos in the prepaid dominant markets. The rapid rise of multi-SIM adoption is a result of several supply-side undercurrents and demand-side dynamics.
Supply-side undercurrents
The foremost trend is the snowballing dominance of prepaid segment, especially in prepaid dominant markets. The price-war and aggressive promotions have led to opportunistic usage patterns. The handset market has witnessed the emergence of dual SIM phones since 2011. Device ownership pattern shows more than 70% of the subscribers use multi-SIM handsets.
Consumer-driven demand-side trends
Nielsen survey confirms a growing inclination among subscribers having dual SIM capability to turn multi-SIM users. Many customers in the prepaid segment gradually become deal seekers and rotational churners, who comprise anywhere between 25-33% of new acquisitions; their preference only being dictated by the choice of benefits and discounts available to them. The intention to separate work and personal activities, in some instances, also lead to the use of multiple SIMs by individuals. This scenario has now gained prominence even in prepaid dominant markets with almost 5-8% of subscribers preferring to maintain independent connections for their personal and work related calls.
Multi-SIM syndrome posing new threats
Multi-SIM proliferation poses multiple threats to telecom business. The net subscriber addition gets adversely affected and ARPU, the sacrosanct KPI, heads southwards. This is due to the fact that subscriber growth largely happens on account of customers acquiring a second or possibly a third SIM. As telcos continue to engage in unhealthy customer acquisition wars, the battle for customer wallet share keeps growing fiercer.
Telco customers use these multiple SIMs opportunistically. So, they have dedicated SIMs for outgoing calls (primarily influenced by deals), for incoming calls (primarily influenced by network coverage) and for data and other services (primarily influenced by QoS). There is a clear segregation of primary and secondary usage, which gets established within a few days of a subscriber taking a new connection.
The telco’s attention clearly needs to shift towards ways to hold onto customers by continuous engagement and pre-empt any change in their needs and address them proactively before they start to look out for alternatives. This can only be achieved through underpinning excellence in customer experience as the differentiator in prepaid dominant markets. Product differentiation and tariff discounting in these markets can only give short term gains, which are neither profitable nor sustainable. Telecom players need to invest more on technologies and processes to help them map, interpret and respond to all customer interactions across touch points, hence, driving a more meaningful and effective customer engagement.
Tackling Multi-SIM conundrum with Analytics-driven actionable insights
In dealing with multi-SIM syndrome, the best weapon in a telcos arsenal is the ability to track down multi-SIM devices and understand consumers’ usage pattern by leveraging huge volumes of data. Telcos need platforms to handle big and fast data with objective-driven analytical models to accurately identify multi-SIM users and then pre-emptively act to enhance stickiness. While all telcos have access to huge volumes of data, it is their ability to transform the data into actionable insights that gives them the edge. Flytxt offers a comprehensive framework with packaged analytics models to establish multi-SIM behaviour. The program has high accuracy levels and it leverages advanced analytical models like product affinity and adaptive cognizance to mitigate the business impact brought on by multi-SIM usage.
Flytxt solution has been able to generate actionable insights on factors responsible for the multi-SIM behaviour and recommend corrective action in line with telcos’ objectives. The deployment of the framework is preceded by primary research to validate the various recommendations and provide qualitative insights, which influence the actions to be taken. The data from primary research helps to link the outcome of the model to the key factors that influence customers to look out for alternative/multiple connections; it also reveals insights on how competition is playing a part in driving Multi-SIM behaviour by inducing customers to shift their usage on specific legs to the second SIM.
With the help of the comprehensive framework that uses analytics models to identify multi-SIM usage patterns and take corrective actions, we have unearthed actionable insights for our clients, some of which are specific to certain markets as captured below:
The Virtuous Cycle of Analytics-Insights-Actions
As evidenced by above insights, multi-SIM syndrome can no longer be denied or avoided and the only way to handle the challenge is by understanding consumer needs better and taking proactive and pre-emptive steps in the right direction to deliver on their expectations.