After decades of being restricted by monopolistic telecommunications regulations, SA may soon be getting a second fixed-line operator that will extend the communications options available to the country and hopefully lower prices. Unfortunately, the lengthy delay in getting monopolistic regulations out of the way has given the incumbent operator the time to prepare, reduce costs and clinch long-term contracts with many of the larger companies in SA.
Now that we have reached the stage when it looks as if the launch of the second national operator (SNO) is looming, the new company will need to take special measures to ensure it gains a competitive advantage.
Simply trying to get into a price war will not do the company or its shareholders any good. The SNO will need to come to market ready to attract and retain new customers, even in the face of stiff competition from the incumbent.
In addition to the products and services it provides, the SNO will have to focus on the rates it charges, taking note of customers` varying requirements in the different market sectors it addresses. In other words, it must ensure it understands its customers and makes itself an indispensable part of their business and private communications lives.
The SNO will need to come to market ready to attract and retain new customers, even in the face of stiff competition from the incumbent.
Charl Barnard, GM of business intelligence at Knowledge Integration Dynamics (KID)
To gain an in-depth overview of its clients and to hold onto them, the SNO will need to ensure it is able to provide decision-makers and other appropriate employees with a single view of their customers. Managing its data efficiently and accurately will therefore have to be a core competency of the SNO if it plans to have a long and prosperous future.
The starting point for useful data management is a properly designed and maintained data architecture that will support the demands the corporation will make on its information. Before populating the data stores, however, the SNO needs to be assured all the customer-related information is correct, in the appropriate format and categorised according to the firm`s architectural specifications.
The first step is data profiling. The process of profiling identifies the data and its attributes, and then assesses the quality and complexity of the information. Working with the data after profiling will be simpler since everyone will understand the data and can easily determine the relationships between information and applications.
Without profiling, companies can suddenly discover data problems halfway through projects - such as bad data, missing values or non-standard entries (also called finger trouble) that can skew the results of any queries or analysis. The hassles involved in resolving these issues will increase the cost of data maintenance, reduce its effectiveness and result in time overruns as resources are refocused on the rush job of fixing the data instead of taking care of customers (and raising revenue).
Following the profiling stage, the company must also ensure its information is of a high quality. The same person cannot be seen as a separate customer, as a simple example, because someone mistyped their surname at some stage, resulting in two entries in the database. If the quality of the information being used for analysis is poor, the results will also be sub-par and the resultant marketing and service efforts directed at customers will not deliver the profits expected.
Finally, the ability to integrate data from diverse applications and databases into a central data store for analysis rounds off the data-centric processes needed to ensure an accurate, single image of each customer is available as required.
Managing data has become easier over the past few years as various products have been released to market to automate and simplify the process. While automation takes much of the manual labour out of data management, the human element cannot be disregarded completely. Hence the SNO needs to ensure that among the many telecoms and business experts it hires, it also includes a few data management experts on the team.
Without efficient data handling in the form of an accurate single view of its customers, the SNO will find it does not have the information it needs to compete in what will be an unbalanced market. The SNO will only be successful, effective and competitive if its customers` information is managed correctly.
Share