Contextual Engagement with Roamers – there’s value beyond the Welcome SMS

How important is it to keep your customers engaged? Marketers believe engaged customers are the best customers to have. They buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty. Customers can no longer be kept engaged with mass marketing; they expect a personalized experience, highly relevant to their specific situation based on where they are and what they are doing.

This engagement can be made all the more meaningful by attributing context. The capability to identify and offer customers exactly what they want, when they want it, is the most critical aspect of a successful contextual engagement. It requires communicating the right message, at the right time, in the right place, on the right channel, while accommodating for the customer’s persona, need, and circumstances.

For CSPs, contextually engaging with roamers is all the more crucial. Most roamers avoid roaming services, perceiving them as expensive, and instead opt for what they believe are less costly substitutes, such as OTT apps, WIFI, local SIMs, or prepaid cards. CSPs can establish a mutually advantageous connection with their roamers, encouraging them to use roaming services instead of alternatives, engaging with them at the right moments throughout their journey with personalized messages and best-suited offers. Contextual Engagement with roamers involves understanding enough about each subscriber to ensure that the communication is progressively more anticipated, personal, and relevant as the roamer moves across various travel stages – Before Travel, During Travel, and After Travel.

Before Travel - Send exclusive offers to potential travelers

CSPs can start engaging with roamers even before they embark on their journey. Using advanced data science models and machine learning algorithms, as provided by Mobileum’s Travel Prediction solution, CSPs can predict potential travelers and reach out with offers best suited for them. Outreach before travel provides a larger window for engagement. Not limited to only promoting the right roaming offer, the engagement may also extend to travel packages, airlines, and hotel advertisements that can help the roamers to plan their future journey.

During Travel - Enrich the roaming experience with personalized messages and offers

• Welcome the roamer to their roaming destination with a Welcome Message – Provide information that could be useful for the roamer during his visit, including details for his connected network, customer care contact information, local emergency contacts, and Embassy details.
• Provide Roaming Tariff information to make the roamer aware of the Call / SMS / Data charges while roaming. This roaming tariff advisory allows subscribers to be conscious of the roaming charges and helps prevent bill shock scenarios.
• Campaign Travel Pass / Roaming Pack offers – If the roamer has not subscribed to a roaming pack, send a promotional campaign with roaming offers that best suit the roamer’s needs, based on data such as the subscriber’s profile, previous roaming usage history, trip patterns, and domestic usage. For instance, send a promotional campaign for a ‘Multi-Country Monthly Travel Pass’ to a frequent business traveler persona who visits multiple countries in a month.
• Trial roaming packs - Analyze usage patterns and campaign Trial / Promotional offers to silent roamers. While most roamers tend to be silent during roaming, CSPs can promote trial offers with limited usage/validity, enticing a roamer to use roaming services. For instance, a campaign with an appropriate data pack for their persona, or a Social Networking pack, can be sent to a silent roamer who is typically a heavy data user at home.
• Renew / Upsell suitable roaming packs – Alert subscribers whose roaming pack is expiring to options to renew current roaming pack or upgrade to another relevant roaming pack for their roaming usage.
• Send Emergency alerts - In case of an emergency in any destination, CSPs can send emergency broadcast messages to roamers in the affected destination, advising them to take the appropriate action. Instances such as weather-related alerts, epidemic spread (like COVID-19), or other imminent threats can be sent quickly and easily to roamers that may otherwise not have access to this critical information.

Even After Travel - Though the journey is over, the engagement continues

• Send Important Welcome Back Advisories – CSPs can send Welcome Back advisory messages (as suggested by regulatory agencies) to outbound roamers returning from an epidemic affected region, advising to exercise caution, self-quarantine, or visit relevant government / medical authorities in case of an infection.
• Conduct roaming experience surveys– When a roamer returns home, CSPs can solicit feedback from the roamers on the roaming experience via interactive surveys. Surveys can capture the voice of the customer, encourage future roaming, and provide internal departments valuable feedback to improve services where applicable.

To enable such contextual engagement with roamers, CSPs need an effective outreach solution to communicate with roamers at various travel stages. Mobileum’s iCampaign is an advanced end-to-end campaign management solution that enables operators to launch contextual, personalized, real-time outreach messages and campaigns to roamers, while proactively addressing the opportunity to monetize their roaming status via targeted messages and offers. iCampaign relies on network probes to track a roamer’s movements in real-time. It also offers an intuitive GUI for configuring messages that can be contextualized depending on travel stage, travel destinations, visited networks, preferred outreach channels, and preferred language for communication. iCampaign empowers CSPs to move their focus from mass-market engagement to contextual, personalized engagement, which increases the relevance and timeliness of messages and offers to roamers. Enrich your subscriber’s overall roaming experience while encouraging the adoption of the full breadth of your roaming portfolio for a sought-after uplift to your roaming profitability.

If you want to know more, please contact us.