Telecom Lead India: Flytxt has shared the company’s strategies that have assisted the company to accelerate the growth.
Flytxt says that Big Data analytics platform powers Flytxt’s growth in the Indian telecom market.
In the last decade the world has seen unprecedented growth in the mobile telecom industry. The burgeoning growth of mobile phone adoption and immense competition among various telecom players scrambling to grab market share presented its own set of challenges and opportunities.
The challenges manifested in the form of declining ARPU, high churn rate, diminishing loyalty and lengthy ‘time to market’ product and services. These were especially true for the hitherto unsaturated and predominantly prepaid markets of the emerging economies.
Flytxt saw the opportunity in this highly competitive and rapidly growing industry where communication service providers (CSPs) were struggling to sustain or augment their profits and efficiently manage the ever growing subscriber base.
Flytxt started its journey in 2007 with a vision to help CSPs take-on these challenges and create a differentiation through the hidden opportunities that lay within the prevailing telecom landscape. Flytxt developed a purpose-built and domain focused technology that could enable the CSPs to generate incremental revenue, increase loyalty, reduce churn and engage subscribers with timely, contextual and relevant offers and with measurable outcomes.
While the technology that Flytxt evolved was quite unique and addressed the problems CSPs were facing at that point of time, the company was cognizant of the fact that, in order to keep pace with this dynamic and highly disruptive space, constant innovation was imperative.
Flytxt began with two customers and within a span of few years acquired over 29 customers across 22 countries around the globe. Posting a growth of over 300 to 400 percent every year, Flytxt has positioned itself as a leading provider of Big Data Analytics powered Customer Experience Management solution to CSPs. The key drivers behind this success were Flytxt’s ability to constantly innovate and adapt its technology to the changing demands of the telecom industry.
As the subscriber base and service offering by telecoms grew at a rapid pace, it became increasingly difficult for legacy technologies to efficiently manage support the demands of the changing dynamics of telecom industry. Flytxt presaged this scenario and had already initiated the transition from legacy system to Big Data driven technology.
Under the guidance of Vinod Vasudevan, CEO, Flytxt shaped its product and marketing goals for the future.
The Evolution of Big Data Analytics powered Real-Time Decisioning and Business Consulting
Flytxt strategic path can be described to have taken shape in four phases where it made its transition from a technology product company to a turn-key Big Data Analytics powered solutions provider company, with the goal of generating economic value for CSPs by increasing revenue, reducing churn, increasing CSAT & generating new revenue streams through highly scalable and agile technology platform.
Closed Loop Mobile Marketing
After in-depth interactions with the leading telecom players to specifically understand their requirements and address the existing operator challenges, Flytxt launched its product NEON in 2008 and offered a unique solution with a patented technology. At that time, NEON emerged as an unrivalled solution in the market that addressed the Telco’s marketing and key subscriber challenges. A number of VAS and Business Intelligence providers broadly competed with Flytxt but none had the niche.
Flytxt enabled operators to streamline their marketing efforts through customer segmentation, increased agility, enabling them to manage their inventory efficiently and measure the impact of their campaigns. This end-to end, closed-loop campaign management platform helped CSPs to deliver tailored products and services through precise segmentation and rationed delivery methods, thus, enabling CSPs to offer well planned and highly accurate services to subscribers.
The result of implementation of this platform meant that Operators get a clear visibility of their ROI and do not waste their time and resources for their marketing promotions through blind targeting.
Though Flytxt brought transformation to the marketing practices that were in existence at the time, Flytxt learnt that telecom landscape is changing fast. In order to keep the platform relevant to the changing demands of the market and to satisfy the ever smarter and ever increasing subscriber base as well as to address the Telco’s challenges of declining APRU and cut-throat competition, it needed to adapt swiftly and do more.
Real-time closed loop Mobile Marketin
The challenges that Flytxt faced in its next stage of growth was to ensure that ‘time to market’ products and services reduce significantly. Subscriber awareness was growing steadily and they were becoming ever more discerning in their choices. This was still the era of voice and text.
Data was just making an inroad into the telecom scene with feature phones and data services. As the technology moves closer to real-time the accuracy of targeting and propensity of conversion increases. This is because, the CSP promotions are able to engage the subscriber ‘in the moment’ when he/she is involved in a certain activity and extend services related to it. As a result, the subscriber is able to find more value and context from the offers and is more likely to convert. This was achieved through real-time integration with the operator’s network as opposed to processing batch files at the end of the day’s transactions.
With the fast changing telecom world and flurry of services, the opportunity to market a product or service to the subscriber had reduced to minutes. With this advancement in technology, subscribers received relevant, timely and contextual offers, tailored to their preferences with the obvious result that they were opted more. Not only did it notch up the subscriber experience, it also helped the operators generate higher incremental revenue.
Analytics based technology
As the global market matured and Big Data became more affordable, this was the time when Flytxt foresaw the change in market trends and under the leadership of Prateek Kapadia, CTO, Flytxt started employing Big Data Analytics to monetize the ever increasing subscriber data. Due to a staggering growth in subscriber base, the traditional query based technologies used for manual segmenting and targeting subscribers were not adequate to either crunch the huge amount of data that was being generated nor was it sufficient to produce any timely insights based on which decisions could be taken on what kind of campaigns will work best.
Using this technology Flytxt is now helping the CSPs to combat the issues of 4V’s – Volume, Velocity, Variety and veracity so as to generate the 5th V- Value. Big Data analytics enabled Flytxt to segment the target audience for a particular campaign, derive insights and recommend product and services within a span of minutes. Insights were obtained from a subscriber’s usage patterns, behavioral history, demographics and context. It was possible to offer promotions to subscribers in real-time leveraging on the vast sea of subscriber data available with the CSPs and adding economic value for the operators.
In this period Flytxt also saw its Customer base increasing many folds and cementing its roots in Africa and Middle-East apart from Asia. With its new approach and improved capabilities Flytxt achieved significant industry benchmarks in reducing churn and generating incremental revenue for its clients, by completely leveraging on its big data analytics powered solutions. Flytxt also cemented its partnership with Intel to ensure a more robust service for its Big Data technology.
Being able to achieve significant results and mature its current strategy, the natural next for Flytxt was to guide its solutions to take market leading position.
In telecom industry the only constant is change and in order to stay ahead it is absolutely essential to constantly innovate and develop solutions even before your customers demand it.
Real-time Analytics based technology and Mobile Advertising
For Flytxt, the course for the future lay in strengthening its offering that stood the test of time. With this vision and under supervision of Abhay Doshi, VP, Product and Marketing, who had an illustrious career of working with some of the world’s leading telecom companies, Flytxt is all set to take its product to the next level.
With increasing threat from the Over the Top (OTT) services, Telco’s profits are steadily declining. With the recent reports of chat services overtaking SMS, this reality is knocking on the door. As data services become ever more popular, the operators are reduced to mere pipe providers. It is imperative for them to take the reins back from these OTT players and increase subscriber loyalty while preventing them from churning. In such a complex environment constantly monitoring the market changes and at the same time devising operational strategies can be immensely overwhelming for the Telecom Operators.
In not so distant future Flytxt’s real-time analytics technology will be able to automatically churn out campaigns – setting the target audience, nature of offer and the time of delivery. It will generate insights, actions and recommend the ‘next best offer’ to the subscriber set against the given KPIs, which will reduce the processing time to mere seconds.
Further, the telecom operators have some inherent assets by virtue of the huge database of its subscribers and the inventory, which when monetized through advertising can bring rewarding returns. However, for a long time the market was apprehensive of this approach, and rightly so, due to subscribers’ privacy concerns. Flytxt, though, was quite sure that this will be the future of the mobile industry and continued working towards a solution. It, finally, was able to come up with an answer through anonymizing subscribers’ data for the purpose of advertising.
This eliminated the subscriber privacy issue completely as the processed data being used for advertising could never be traced back to any individual subscriber.
Flytxt business model envisioned to connect brands and advertising agencies to mobile subscribers through multiple operators’ infrastructure. Mobile operators bring in inventory and subscriber insights which are leveraged by brands and agencies to run highly targeted advertising campaigns. Thus, a single platform – the ad marketplace- brings all entities of the advertising ecosystem under one roof for mutually profitable and seamless collaboration. Being able to monetize Operator’s inventory with a secure technology that protects subscriber privacy, Flytxt enables Telcos to derive economic value from their inherent assets, thereby, creating a new revenue stream.
Flytxt has developed effective strategies to cater to Telco’s of different sizes. By customizing the technology and services according to their customer base and the market they operate in, Flytxt has been able to optimize the benefits for these Telco’s from its offerings. For instance, a Telco in an under-developed economy will have a completely different set of challenges than that of a developed economy or an emerging economy. Flytxt’s experienced team of experts analyzes an operator’s goals and challenges to provide a solution that will best address their issues.
The Evolution Continues
Flytxt is constantly innovating and developing product, technology and business model. In the future the company strives to extend their reach to developed world harping on reverse innovation phenomenon of sharing best innovative practices from emerging markets. The company also foresees opportunities for extending their product and solution portfolio to new domains of Banking and Retails who are also big potential consumers of matured real-time Big Data Analytics technology.
