We judge leaders by how well they make big, strategic decisions. But corporate success also depends on how well the rank-and-file employees make thousands of small decisions.
— Frank Rohde
In the business world, every decision that impacts your employees, partners or customers is an important one. Consider, for example, the decision to offer a customer a specific product or a particular service pricing bundle. These decisions, often made in real time by empowered employees, thousands of times per day, have a large impact on the effectiveness and profitability of your business. For communications service providers (CSPs) in particular, small decisions extend deep into the network where decisions about routing and service interconnection are automatically controlled by business rules (policy). They number in the trillions and impact revenues and reputation if mishandled.
Most businesses, of course, realize the importance of getting these front-line decisions consistently right. The science of business intelligence—analyzing customer, business and market data to drive better decisions throughout an organization—is something that many businesses practice. Fewer businesses, however, have a holistic view of the true effectiveness of those decisions after they’re made, something known as Decision Yield. Defined by Frank Rohde, Decision Yield measures the overall quality of a decision and is defined by five characteristics:
- How accurate is the decision?
- How consistent is the decision?
- How quickly can we make the decision?
- How quickly can we execute the decision?
- How much does it cost us to make the decision?
Where do you find the answers to these questions? Start with your network. By correlating and analyzing your network traffic—which includes data on your customers, products and costs—your business can unlock new insights into the Decision Yield of your day-to-day decisions and improve your business and network operations. Neustar’s IP Enablers, for example, is a network analytics solution that has helped businesses reduce their operating costs by 20% or more through bettering the understanding of business decisions like customer segmentation and call routing.
Let’s look at a few ways that network analytics can help your business make better, higher-yield decisions consistently:
- Marketing – Your network contains a wealth of customer data that, when consolidated and analyzed, may provide new insights into undiscovered customer segments based on information such as location, privacy/policy settings and even mobile device capabilities. Understanding your customers in this new light allows your business to make faster, more accurate decisions about pricing and product offers.
- Customer Acquisition – Your network data can help you better project a customer’s lifetime value as well as identify potential high-risk customers (e.g., those who have previously defaulted on payments). This information, in turn, helps your business reduce risk and focus on your most profitable customers.
- Service Delivery – For CSPs and large enterprises, operational decisions, like network operator look-up or least-cost call routing, can make a difference of millions of dollars. By analyzing the traffic in their network, businesses are able to make better choices that improve customer service while reducing costs.
- Operations – CSPs and large enterprises also face unique operational challenges such as toll fraud and regulatory compliance (e.g., number portability requirements, digital copyright laws, etc.). Network analytics can detect and mitigate fraud instances before they happen (for more on this topic, see my previous post, Four Ways to Beat Bad Debt and Fraud at the Door) and more effectively enforce regulatory compliance.
As more businesses leverage their big data through information and analytics, they will be talking in terms of decision management and measuring success in terms of Decision Yield. To learn more about how network analytics and Neustar’s IP Enablers improve the quality of day-to-day business decisions, watch this short four-minute video presented by my colleague, Michael Kane. Consider it the first of many good decisions to come.
Tags: IP Enabler, Frank Rohde, CSPs, Decision Management
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