New Customer Data Platform (CDP) Built for Telcos by Telcos Launched

Ikue the innovative UK-based customer data and personalisation start-up, has launched its new Customer Data Platform (CDP) designed and built specifically for marketing teams within telecoms operators. The product has been developed to solve the unique challenges of the telecoms market and is based on decades of direct experience by a team of senior telecoms technologists and marketers.

Ikue’s CDP has been built from the ground up to enable and deliver accurate and effective customer engagement for marketers. It differs dramatically from enterprise applications such as CRM and generalist CDPs in that its primary purpose is enabling personalisation at scale for marketing. This requires data to be unified from a much broader range of applications, systems, and channels, providing a rich real-time 360-degree view of a telco’s customer to optimise the timing, and targeting of messages and offers. The cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform is powered by AI and creates a single location for an operator to collect, consolidate, organise, and then analyse its customer data.

Bronwynne Stoddart, founder and CEO at Ikue, stated: “Telecom operators are under pressure to manage the optimal equilibrium between shareholder interests, increasing price regulations, legal restrictions, and licence fee costs from national regulators.

As a result, they need to create and leverage new revenue streams and accelerate the digitalisation of their existing processes and customer touchpoints to manage costs and improve margins. To meet these challenges, operators are making significant investments in customer marketing programs to reduce customer churn, reduce price erosion and drive cross- and upsell opportunities for additional products and services.”

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These marketing programs require a single, unified view of each individual customer to target the right person, at the right time, with the right message. At the moment, however, too many customer engagement messages by operators are poorly targeted, mistimed, and often irrelevant. As a result, typical response rates are under one percent, significantly decreasing the RoI in marketing programs. With Ikue, operators can expect to see a significant uplift in incremental revenue over existing marketing programs.

Ikue’s CDP has out-of-the-box bi-directional data connectors that integrate to both source and destination systems. Data streams ingest data from a broad range of source systems within the operator’s existing system landscape – including data warehouses, digital behaviour data and CRM platforms. Activation streams ensure that the data is easily supplied to, complementary of, and accessible by the entire martech ecosystem. It’s out-of-the box connectors integrates with industry leading DSP’s, social media channels and other marketing platforms.

Ikue’s CDP assembles all customer data together in one place in real time, for the first time. This, combined with Ikue’s real-time predictive models, ensures telecom operators deliver real-time hyper personalised and relevant customer communication to their subscribers.

Stoddart continued: “The explosion of customer data and customer touchpoints has resulted in multiple data silos being used by the different martech applications across various marketing processes. These data sources contain different versions of the customer’s profile at different times, resulting in inconsistent messages across channels. Customers are confused by the operators’ marketing offers. Ikue’s CDP will be used as the single version of the truth by all Martech applications, simplifying the data landscape, reducing costs of data management, improving adherence to privacy, and ultimately complementing existing Martech applications.

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Our application is transformational as the SaaS platform is able to assemble data from disparate locations across the telco itself, stitch it together to form a persistent ID, which allows marketers to resolve identity of visitors in any channel and leverage the right data and insights to inform in the moment decisions for every customer interaction and communication, enabling a multitude of use cases.”

Using a simple user interface, marketers can easily connect new data sources and activation channels to Ikue’s CDP. Ikue CDP’s sophisticated and complex data engineering capability is highly configurable, reducing integration effort for operators, resulting in reduced implementation effort and accelerating time to market. At the click of a button, Ikue’s machine learning will automatically recommend the mapping between the source data and the Ikue Customer State Model. IT departments would typically take years to deliver the same solution with significant upfront CAPEX costs.

The Customer State Model, based on TM Forum standards, depicts the overall state of the customer at any point in time. The predefined taxonomy automatically organises customer traits into a hierarchy for ease of use and understanding and is based on known high value data attributes needed for telco marketing activities.

Stoddart concluded: “Ikue is targeting telecom operators outside of the traditionally larger markets of the US and Western Europe, instead looking to target small to midsize operators who tend to have a relatively lower level of marketing maturity and are not well served by the large marketing cloud players meaning it is more difficult to deliver a high-quality customer experience.“

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