Telstra to tailor customer 'offers' with big data

Telstra will begin the New Year with a doubling down on its efforts to retain customers, revealing plans to plumb its big data reserves to find ways to better tailor product and price “offers”.

The telco is to establish a ‘customer value creation’ team of analysts that will sit in Melbourne and use existing data assets to come up with new products and offers that reach customers “in the right way, at the right time and through the right channels”.

The right time – at least initially – appears to be if existing customers present to service channels as unhappy, or if the customer has already churned away to a rival service provider.

Several analysts will focus their efforts around “specific customer episodes, such as retention, moves, saves and win backs”.

That is expected to including “distilling compelling customer insights related to [those] episodes and recommending the course of action to be taken.”

It was unclear how granular this action would be – whether down to an individual customer level, or to a group of customers that presented to Telstra’s service channels with similar issues.

Clarification was being sought from a Telstra spokesperson at the time of publication.

In addition to addressing reactive issues, it appears that part of the new team will focus on identifying “current and future customer value”, suggesting also a predictive focus on keeping existing customers happy.

The telco said work in this area would target “specific customer micro-segments” and “focus on enhancing customer lifetime value”.

Telstra said it wanted to “challenge the norm of how companies engage existing customers and … drive innovative solutions across [its] channels”.

The team generally will target Telstra’s consumer and small business segments and work with a range of existing Telstra teams to see its actions implemented.