No business can afford to make uninformed decisions about acquisition proposals, new contracts or equipment, or marketing campaigns. Telecom business intelligence is a field of business intelligence that deals with the telecommunications industry. Independent business intelligence agents, who specialize in acquiring and analyzing telecom data, work as consultants for clients who want to improve business practices. Some telecom companies also retain their own in-house business intelligence experts, who mine company data on customer usage, network availability, billing and service records, and the larger telecom market to provide information executives need to improve their business practices.
There are no profits for a telecom company if customers are lost as fast as they are gained. Telecoms use business intelligence to mine their customers’ data, allowing them to devise bundling packages and other marketing strategies and increase customer satisfaction and retention. The mining of raw data from business office records, network traffic usage, and billing and service records, and presenting the data in an easy-to-understand format to managers, is a valued service. A telecom provider can ensure continuing profits by allowing customer needs and expectations to drive provided services. Identifying those needs and expectations is a growing focus of telecom business intelligence, as they seek to increase the steady profits of the telecom managers who hire them to mine the data.
Telecom business intelligence can help companies improve network access for their clients. In some cases, telecom business intelligence helps to combat fraudulent schemes to rob bandwidth on networks, which drive up costs due to lost revenues. Fraud detection methods can be used to report network leaks, providing the necessary data to prosecute for damages. Monitoring the traffic and availability of cellular networks can also provide data to ensure that networks do not drop calls too frequently. Poor network performance tempts customers to jump to other providers, so finding ways to ensure consistent and reliable networking services ensures a satisfied customer base.
Telecom business intelligence can also inform management whether profitability is being lost in a business organization. This can inform decisions on purchasing and hiring. Data on the key performance indicators helps make organizational decisions. Externally, market analysis of opportunities can help a telecom company to expand their services to cover larger land areas and acquire additional customer bases through the acquisition of competitors' companies.