It seems there is an endless array of products being offered to mobile customers every day. Prepaid plans, postpaid plans, new bundles, new handsets, movement to services on tablets, increase bandwidth offers for data streaming, etc. As operators load the consumers up with more and more choices, understanding what is being bought, who is buying it, is the product making money, when does it start making money, will a new plan rob my bottom line accidentally, etc, are all questions operators must be able to answer, and on an almost daily basis.
As an operator, you should be asking a series of daily questions that need to be answered to protect your business and identify significant revenue opportunities and risks:
1. What are your product margins today? Which products are generating positive returns? Which programs are missing their business plan? By how much?
2. When a new product is proposed, do we understand what the impact will be from our existing customers that migrate from their current product to this new product?
3. When a competitor responds to your new offer with a comparable offer, how fast can you see that impact to your market?
4. What is the right product offer, the right price, for the right customer segment, in the right section of the network that we should be focusing our marketing resources around?
Many of these questions require much, much more than simple metrics and reports generated by mining activities. They require advanced analytics that allow operators to predict behaviors and successes (and failures) before those events come to pass, and most importantly, before budget and resources are focused in the wrong areas! Advanced analytics offer predictive, detailed analysis about what an operator should do, why they should do it, when they should do it, and what the expected outcome should be. Unlike simple forecasting, analytics is based on science, and offers a proven methodolgy for establishing successful strageties in the business in a near real time environment.
ROCware Product Performance Management (PPM) addresses these (and many other) issues, in a near-real time, high performance analytics environment. Using ROCware’s advanced analytics technology, PPM is able to provide operators with a full view of their products, margins, and a highly robust future-view into margins, customer and product behaviors, and many other factors that are crucial to properly track and manage your product portfolio.
It is very common today for an operator to have access to limited product data. Looking more closely at what the operator actually does have access to, it is really often based on excel spreadsheets, with limited information around sales metrics, with some segmentation. This is not set up as a repeatable process, and thus the requests are completed manually, and most commonly with 4-6 week latency. This doesn’t help an organization understand margin and profitability; it doesn’t help an organization understand competitive impacts, or the impact of a proposed plan on your existing market. ROCware PPM does all of this automatically, every day.
There was a time when a monthly performance report was adequate. That was before products became far more complex, and competitive pressures were measured in days (sometimes hours). An operator without daily views into their product health and threats is vulnerable to risks that could cost the business millions of dollars in just a single month. ROCware PPM, along with the other ROCware suite of advanced analytics solutions, takes this worry off the table, allowing operators to quickly and confidently mange changes in their business.