Predicting potential brand advocates in telecommunications

14%

uplift

of referral-based acquisition since the launch of the programme.

weeks

from data diagnostics to the first list of potential brand advocates among clients

10 000

pieces of user-generated content

analysed additionally to understand why and when customers share good experiences

The Business Problem

Our client, a mobile network provider in Northern Europe, was facing the widespread challenge of slowing growth and rising acquisition costs. New entrants to the market from adjacent or even distant industries were continuously stealing the more price-sensitive customers.

Our Task

That’s when we were tasked to come up with insights to drive new signups by other mechanisms than price promotions.

Our Solution

One of the best behavioural predictors in the telecommunications industry is the interaction between customers. Unhappy customers influence others and can cause them to churn; happy customers, too, can influence others and attract them to their own network provider. However, happy customers are more likely to stay quiet about their experience and are far too often ignored when CX efforts are
designed.

Because of this we built a model that predicts who the most satisfied customers in our client’s database are (utilizing our Predictive NPS) approach. In addition, we mined social media, forums and other customer feedback to understand better why and when people are willing to put in good words about their provider. The insights were used to amplify our existing model to predict which customers are most likely to want to share this kind of experiences with their social media following, boosting the impact that each activated referral had.

Business Impact

Armed with a list of potential brand advocates, our client came up with a renewed incentive mechanism that was launched as an ongoing programme. The combined model has shown immediate results and a 14% uplift of referral-based acquisition since the launch of the programme.