Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - WAI (Wiraya Activation Intelligence)

Teaser

European mobile telecom operators struggle with low customer satisfaction and loyalty in highly competitive markets resulting in high churn, lower Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and high marketing spend to win new customers. Many operators use advanced churn prediction and...

Summary

European mobile telecom operators struggle with low customer satisfaction and loyalty in highly competitive markets resulting in high churn, lower Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) and high marketing spend to win new customers. Many operators use advanced churn prediction and Next Best Action (NBA) models; however, they have no effective way to leverage this knowledge at large scale when commuting with their customers. Now they are demanding tools to effectively engage on a personal level with the millions of customers that are predicted to churn, and thereby increase customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Wiraya’s managed cloud service cost-efficiently orchestrates and delivers personalized communication enabling dialogues with large customer bases by blending voice and text in an innovative way to mimic human communication. Today, the communication is optimized manually based on our team’s experience. The focus of the business innovation project Wiraya Activation Intelligence (“WAI”) is to take our next generation product to the market, a product that is automatically data-driven by utilizing Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) technology, or specifically Machine Learning (a subset of AI). Based on previous and real-time interactions, WAI learns and adapts what, when and how to communicate with each individual by matching profiles with specific communication micro journeys. The algorithms become better over time as they see more data, resulting in ongoing automatic optimization. The product is utilized in specific use cases such as; helping customers to change price plan, order new handset, renew service or get support through a mobile device, which in turn improve customer satisfaction and loyalty. This is in line with our overall goal to optimize customer lifetime value at a scale that is not possible through manual means.

Mobile technology plays a critical role in fulfilling the ambitions of universal internet access. The spread of information and communications technology through mobile and digital technologies offers a transformative opportunity to accelerate human progress and bridges the digital divide. When telecom operators start to communicate with their end-customers on their own terms, with a message containing a relevant, individually tailored offers, the end-customer saves time and energy, and stress levels can be reduced which contributes to a higher quality of life. As a provider to mobile operators, Wiraya and WAI is a part of the move towards this human-centered economy and the improvement of the overall end-customer experience.

The specific objectives of the business innovation project are;
1. Validation of innovative technology - Taking the existing prototype to a fully scalable operational product, including automated provisioning of new clients, and validated performance & security. Optimized model selection, and chaining of models to enable fully automated communication program creation.
2. Customer trials of new cloud service - Infuse models with lots of real-life training data from trial clients and combine with content fragments to optimize the conversion numbers.
3. Verifying business strategy - The business plan and strategy that Wiraya has developed will be further refined and validated. It will contain the activities and expected costs needed to ensure that our new service reaches the market.

Through investing in WAI and benefiting from our cutting-edge AI technology and expertise, the EU is capitalizing on the digital opportunities in the age of the 4th industrial revolution. As a consequence, EU’s status as a high-technology region will improve, which, in turn, will attract leading scientists and enterprises. The transferability of the AI technology and expertise in securing EU’s innovation climate and global AI competitiveness, not only within the telecom industry but also within other industry verticals. Already today, we see business potential for the development and marketing of a

Work performed

Most of the focus of the work performed in the first period has been centered around the two first of our main objectives for the business innovation project; (i) validation of innovative technology and (ii) customer trials of new cloud services.

We have made significant progress in moving the platform to become more automatic, rather than manual, in order to make scaling possible. The telecom operators have vasts amounts of data and a lot of effort has been put into getting integration and data pipeline in place to support a continuous near real-time data flow. The data flow consists of getting target groups to the WAI platform, getting the conversion and opt-out data, and sending results back to the operator. In parallel, we have updated the platform to be compliant with the new GDPR regulations, a necessity to be able to address the European market.

The customer trials have been focused on testing communication hypothesis and collecting communication data. The hypothesis testing has been based on historical data and deep customer interviews to understand underlying motivations for customer behavior. We already see an impact of 2-3 times the effect of the communication compared to the control groups in the use cases we have tested. The data collection we are doing at the same will serve as a training set to the models we have developed during the project. The models will optimize things like time of communication, the day of communication, selection of communication program, etc.

The commercialization of the innovation project has just started and there are no significant results to report yet. However, with our primary efforts, we have validated the interest in the market.

Final results

At the end of the project, WAI will be an AI-driven, fully automated platform that, with minimal configuration, engages with telecom customers via a combination voice and text to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty, and thereby minimizes the risk for churn. This will enable the telecom operators to make full use of the churn prediction functions they already have in place. With the participation of Tier 1 European operators in full-scale tests during the project, we will get proven results.

With our efforts to save 5% of the annual churning customer for the operators, we hope to turn the operators’ focus from just getting the next new customer, to value the customers they already have. For the individual consumer, these means better service and overall customer experience since the experience is tailored to their needs.

A quick on-boarding time a technology that generates proven value makes it possible to scale up to successfully handle 500,000 customer interactions daily.

Following the specific objectives of the business innovation project we expect the following results;
1. Validation of innovative technology - Automatic matching of best communication journey for any given profile in key markets using chaining of multiple models from a repository of trained specific purpose models.
2. Customer trials of new cloud service - Validated impact of trial and conversion of telecom operators participating in trials into paying clients.
3. Verifying business strategy - An investor ready business innovation plan, including financials and full Go-To-Market-Strategy.

Website & more info

More info: https://www.wiraya.com/.