Huawei Insights: How the DT4DI White Paper 2.0 is Revolutionizing NPS Management in Telecom Industry

Following the release of the DT4DI 2.0 white paper at the DTW 24 event, we interviewed Zhang Lei, the Vice President in network performance and converged data operations for Huawei, for a deeper dive into the significance of the project.

DT4DI stands for ‘Digital Twin for Decision Intelligence’, so a trade show focused on digital transformation was the perfect place to unveil it. DTW is run by the TM Forum, which has been promoting collaboration and progress within the telecoms industry for decades. Huawei is one of the core contributors to DT4DI, so we started by asking Zhang Lei to summarise the significance of this major update to the project.

“We are honoured to participate in the DT4DI project under DATA&AI, one of TMF's five major themes,” said Zhang Lei. “The core of this project is to combine technologies such as Digital Twin, AI, and Decision Intelligence with service processes to help carriers solve complex problems in complex scenarios and perform analysis and decision-making more quickly and accurately, thereby releasing data dividends and bringing incremental business values to carriers.

The DT4DI white paper 2.0 adds the carrier NPS [Net Promoter Score] management scenario to the smart marketing scenario 1.0. This document describes how to improve carriers' NPS management efficiency through solution innovation in terms of product, network and service, and how to jointly contribute to multiple high-value UCs with industry-leading carriers and suppliers.

Problems Existing in Traditional NPS

According to GSMA, the global Unique MBB user penetration rate has already reached 69% in 2023 and is expected to only reach 74% by 2030, with a CAGR of less than 1.7% over the next five years. Especially for high-value dense urban areas and economically developed regions, the CAGR will be even lower, indicating that the era of demographic dividend for global operators has passed.

Almost all the operators face increasing competition, making managing existing customers the key to further business growth, and NPS is the key metric for managing existing customers. Telecommunications operators worldwide will increasingly focus on NPS management and require a new solution to address the traditional NPS issues.

“Traditional NPS cannot comprehensively, accurately, and understand customer satisfaction in real time,” said Zhang Lei. “The telecom network has a large number of users and complex and diverse services. However, traditional NPS usually adopts regular random sampling, which has problems such as few samples, large randomness, general and untimely feedback results.”

Innovative NPS Solution Application

As Zhang Lei mentioned, Huawei's innovative NPS solution has been deployed by some globally leading operators. At China Mobile Guangxi, Huawei’s SmartCare solution identified potential network detractors with tariff packages involving multiple dimensions, such as traffic and voice usage. Then they used Huawei's graph engine-based Smart Decision solution to match customers with products and recommend the most suitable marketing channels. This improved product satisfaction and marketing success rate by 20 percent.

In Indonesia, Huawei SmartCare's solution was used to identify potentially dissatisfied customers by modelling and analysing network experience data, tariff package data, complaint data, etc. Whereas in Thailand historical customer complaint data and network experience data was used to help customer service personnel proactively care for potentially dissatisfied users. This increased the complaint interception rate by 30% and consequently reduced churn, which is expected to save tens of millions of dollars of revenue for carriers every year.

Conclusion

“The DT4DI White Paper 2.0 provides clear guidance for operators' digital transformation,” concluded Zhang Lei. “In the future, we will increase our investment to continuously improve NPS's capabilities in managing various solutions. At the same time, we expect more operators and vendors to join the DT4DI project and contribute more innovation and time to jointly promote innovation and development in the digital transformation of the telecom industry.”

Traditional NPS is a reactive metric and therefore decisions based on it will tend to be a bit hit-and-miss. Additionally, with so many variables involved in the delivery of communications services, it can be difficult to attribute changes in NPS to any specific factors. The NPS management problem is gradually being resolved by addressing it in segments based on customer journey. With the introduction of data and AI technologies, the DT4DI project will provide a brand-new perspective for solving NPS management issues.