Telco Deep Dive 2019: Maxis leverages data and analytics to be more relevant to users

• Uses past, real time data to offer personalised recommendations, increase stickiness
• Democratise & build data to be used across Maxis for forecasting, reporting, customer analytics

You would have seen the billboards around the Klang Valley and the online ads. Maxis Bhd has been touting the capabilities of it’s A.i ready network to serve customers and the nation.

And underpinning that intelligent network is a layer of software collecting the data with algorithms going through the huge volume of data, making sense and identifying patterns from it.

This goes on at the software level while a tectonic shift in customer behaviour has well and truly started. Aware that customers are increasingly choosing to interact with it digitally, Maxis understands that it can offer an immense amount of value to its customers if what is recommends to them is highly customised. And of course this brings us to the world of big data & analytics.

Tan Lay Han, Chief Sales & Service Officer of Maxis needs no convincing about the power of AI & data analytics. He in fact had a Maxis store in May open with a new retail concept powered by analytics  tools which are being used to enable Maxis to better understand customers for more personalised engagement, including customer demographics and sentiment, customers’ time in-store, customer journey and zonal engagement.

As an increasingly data rich, analytics company, Tan, in the following Q&A talks about how Maxis is using analytics, investing in upskilling and also shared three key things Maxis does to ensure it delivers personalized digital experience that allows it to offer customers more value and relevance.

How is Maxis using data and analytics to deliver better services to its customers, both at the corporate and consumer end? Do give examples of your analytics in action.

The insights gained from data and analytics enable us to improve customer experience at every touch point through improved services, fast feedback and customised offerings. This means knowing what customers want ahead of time and offering what they want, when they want it.

Over the past couple of years, we have used data analytics to provide continuous value to our consumers, for example, via our HotlinkMU offerings which gives Hotlink customers five unique mobile internet and other offers everyday on their Hotlink RedApp.

We have also rolled out our advance network analytics and customer experience management platform that enables our network service team to easily monitor the service level performance of our voice, data and SMS for each customer including our corporate customers.

In May 2019, we launched our brand new Maxis concept store, which was transformed into a unique destination for increasingly digital savvy customers. Infused with a new design language and cutting-edge technology for a new level of personalised digital experience, the store offers highly engaging, relevant and rewarding interactions for customers.

This store is akin to a live retail analytics tool which we use to enable us to better understand customers for more personalised engagement, including customer demographics and sentiment, customers’ time in-store, customer journey and zonal engagement.

Your entire customer experience promise is centered around the NPS method. Since you started your NPS journey in 2015, what have been the most significant actions you have taken to improve your customer experience?

One of the key initiatives that we have taken was to improve customers’ journey at every touch point that they have with us. We want to ensure that the customer journey begins on the right foot and continues seamlessly for the rest of the customer’s lifespan with us. These include improvement in processes, product and network experience, channels and communications.

Throughout all these improvement initiatives, we put a lot of emphasis on training our frontliners. For our home fibre service, we revamped and retrained our team of Maxperts, our certified business solutions experts, and provided an avenue for customers to give their feedback on the support they received.

Overall, our efforts in delivering differentiated and unmatched personalised experiences resulted in our Touch Point NPS improving year after year. In Q3 2019, we reached a record high of +58 points. Meanwhile, Our NPS Score specifically for our home fibre service improved to +40 from +15 at the beginning of the year, a testament to the continuous improvement that we have undertaken to give an unmatched personalized experience to our customers.

[Para edited for accuracy.]

While we are pleased with these high scores and improvements, we recognize that there is always room to improve further, which is why we are continuously enhancing our processes and our customer journey, especially in a time where consumer behavior continues to evolve rapidly.

It is easy to say you aim to offer personalised experiences to customers, but with 10 million customers, you still need to segment customers into certain groups. What are these groups and how are you delivering experiences to those in these groups?

When it comes to creating personalised digital experiences, there are three things that should be considered:  

• The relationship you have with your customers and how that is driven digitally
• The use of data analytics in getting to know your customers as intimately as possible; and
• Building trust and capabilities to offer compelling products and services to customers.

Our customers interact digitally with us through apps, which also enable them to take control of their accounts and to self-serve all their needs. In addition to the self-serve apps, we can also add an immense amount of value to customers if what you recommend to them is highly customised. Customers are a lot more intuitive in terms of what they want. They need different products based on their needs, time, gender and families.

This is why personalised recommendations are important to us. If we are going to give value and create stickiness for our customers with the Internet, we have to be able to identify them as individuals, and be able to make proactive recommendations. When you give a customer a relevant offer every morning, something they can appreciate, you create an extreme amount of stickiness.

Today, we have the digital capabilities to offer personalised recommendations to each of our customers through the use of past and real time data, resulting in a customer frequently seeing offers that change to his/her needs, whatever they may be.

What have been the main investments you have made in the backend from a technology point to help you deliver personalised services to both your consumers and corporate customers?

The main investments that we have made are in people and processes. It is easy to procure the latest Enterprise Data Lake but without the right people and an operating model, this endeavour is guaranteed to fail.

Having the right people comprising relevant stakeholders across the company and operating model are key to helping us deliver personalised services to our customers. At Maxis, we are now trying to democratise and build data, so that we can use it across the company for forecasting, reporting and customer analytics. We have invested in hiring and reskilling people to form a Business Intelligence Centre-of-Excellence where we push the envelope in terms of what we can do for customers.

We have also adopted methodologies to streamline delivery and also have a top-down approach in pushing the discipline of using data-driven decision making throughout the company.