Regulatory restrictions on the use of customer data are the biggest challenge to telcos looking to build new business models based on increasingly personalised services…or at least that’s what the operators themselves believe.
The regulatory issue came up in a recent operator survey that sought to ascertain whether telcos can hope to catch up with the Internet giants when it comes to marketing sophistication.
The study, commissioned by Chinese BSS company AsiaInfo, was compiled based on responses from 50 operators across the world. The telcos were asked what they see as the biggest constraints to building business models based on monetising customer insights. Regulatory restrictions was the most popular of the six options they had to choose from.
Regulation is a particular issue for operators in Europe, where privacy concerns are more acute than in other markets.
"In Europe more than 60% said this is [their] number one constraint," said Andy Tiller, VP of corporate product marketing, at AsiaInfo, at a press event on Thursday.
80% put regulatory restrictions at either number one or number two he added.
Operators are thinking very conservatively when it comes to the use of customer data, because "it’s so hard to figure out what’s legal," Tiller said.
The second most popular answer was the lack of access to data; that is, where one department within an operator holds customer data, but it is unavailable to a different department that might seek to use it.
For many telcos, "there’s no coordination internally," Tiller said.
As it stands, unlike the Googles and Amazons of the world, telecoms operators are doing very little contextual marketing and offering little in the way of personalised services.
While 66% of the operators surveyed said they consider personalised, contextual marketing that uses real-time data to be very important, just 8% are actually able to provide personalised offers to their subscribers.
And it could be some time before that situation changes.
62% predicted that it will take them two years or more to catch up with the capabilities of the Internet giants.
And on balance the view from the journalists and analysts present at Thursday’s event is that the other 38% – those that believe they can make up ground more quickly – are perhaps "deluded".
