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CASE STUDY
Communications and Media

Dialing up growth

Turning telecom data into B2B revenue.

3-MINUTE READ

Call for change

A platform for personalization

Telecommunications companies are quickly evolving, but they’re facing new types of competition every day, including from players outside the sector. Digitally native companies and adjacent competitors like Netflix and YouTube are raising the bar, increasing customer expectations with personalized experiences powered by artificial intelligence (AI), data analytics and the cloud.

As the largest telecom company in Indonesia with more than 159 million customers, Telkomsel was already in the leading position. It had more than half of the country’s market share in mobile gaming, digital entertainment, digital lifestyle, mobile financial services, enterprise solutions and the Internet of Things. With fierce competition from both inside and outside the sector, however, the telco knew it needed a new avenue for growth to secure its spot at the top.

Innovation and data are core to the telecom industry and its customers are increasingly open to exploring new products and services. This gives telcos an incredible opportunity to enter a new era of customer experience with personalization at the core—the key to Telkomsel’s future growth in the B2B sector.

Luckily for the telecom giant, through user-authenticated data insights, it could create capabilities for its B2B clients to personalize their own customer journeys. This would drive sales, long-term customer loyalty and reduce operating costs.

The company’s existing B2B service, however, was only capable of turning data insights into targeted leads. It lacked advanced personalization mechanisms like buyer-specific product recommendations and channel experiences. Unleashing growth would require empowering B2B clients to completely personalize their customer journeys—from qualified leads to purchase and after-sales service.

When tech meets human ingenuity

Intelligent data, smarter solutions

Accenture saw an opportunity for Telkomsel to monetize its data insights by converting them into a proprietary solution. The company could then sell the solution to its B2B clients in state-owned enterprises and government.

The team proposed a Customer Development Experience Platform (CDXP) that went beyond base-level capabilities. It would need to offer cross-channel user-behaviour tracking, automation, data privacy considerations (e.g., alignment with the GDPR) and a forward-thinking design for long-term viability across industries and sectors.

While the global market is saturated with similar solutions, the team saw this as a niche opportunity to develop a product tailored especially for the Indonesian market. It needed to be scalable with the specifications to operate within the confines of state-owned regulatory complexity—such as ensuring that customer data is only hosted in Indonesian data centers.

Accenture collaborated with Feedloop, a local startup that creates no-code application platforms for business digitalization. Feedloop also provided the Indonesian lens necessary for the niche solution.

Our experts from technology, applied intelligence, cloud, user experience and more came together to collaborate and develop a customer engagement product called Accenture Intelligent Experience Platform (AIXP) for Telkomsel to sell to its B2B customers with several cutting-edge capabilities:

Powered by a cloud platform, the AI and ML framework that supports AIXP can automatically categorize customers into segments based on selected key attributes. It has capabilities to predict user propensity groups for buying behaviors or channel use, customer value, product recommendations based on customer behavior and the brick-and-mortar location a user might visit.

AIXP operates on Indonesian Cloud. But for enterprise clients in highly regulated industries, AIXP provides options to deploy on their on-premises servers or private cloud, while retaining the functionality to connect to data and ads marketplace features.

Should a B2B client require consultancy services for marketing or change management support, experts will provide guidance on enabling use-case implementation and user adoption.

Telkomsel’s new product-as-a-service allows its B2B clients to develop personalized plans in response to unique customer journeys, supports various types of event triggers (like notifying users about personalized offers based on previous and current behaviour) and incorporates A/B testing capabilities for ongoing user-journey optimization.

A valuable difference

Better data, bigger solutions

From concept to successful implementation, it took our teams under a year to provide Telkomsel with a turnkey B2B solution to sell to its clients.

Telkomsel is now able to monetize big data analytics and unearth insights from its existing B2C services, opening a new path for growth. The solution also created another revenue stream through user licenses and additional APIs from Telkomsel’s existing enterprise clients. Finally, it left room for flexibility, with pricing options like capital expenditure and subscription plans for new clients of varying sizes.

Telkomsel has already sold the solution to a national financial institution with about 10 million customers across Indonesia. The platform is expected to increase cross-sell and upsell rates and retention through intelligent customer propensities and segments—and has already increased lead conversions from 5% to 12%.

The company is now positioned to leverage its new, actionable B2B data for further growth. Already, Telkomsel agents are using customer behavior insights and tailored product recommendations to secure new B2B customers, which has increased acceptance rates 20-30%.

AIXP makes Telkomsel a pioneer in Indonesian telecommunications, with the first customer engagement platform of this type on the market. But this is not a set-and-forget project and state-owned enterprises are just the first of the B2B projects; the platform can grow with the company’s ambitions. Currently, there are plans to target several more sectors, starting with logistics and transportation.

“We were on a mission to strengthen our B2B business. Our partnership with Accenture has delivered on this mission with both a turnkey solution for growth and a lever for enhancing our client experiences”

— Singue Kilatmaka, Strategy Manager – Telkomsel

Meet the team

Budiono

Managing Director – Artificial Intelligence Lead
LinkedIn