In previous articles, we’ve established that customer experience, measured via the net promoter score (NPS), is directly linked to loyalty. We also shared some of the ways that telcos can improve NPS scores:

• Flexible, No-Contract Plans
• Fast Customer Support
• Bill Transparency
• Rapid SIM Delivery
• Rewarding Referral Programs
• Personalized Experiences

Focusing on personalized experiences, in particular, we touched on how rapidly adapting and launching your telco’s product offerings to market conditions boosts customer satisfaction. 

Now, we can share how we help our partner telco brands do just that. 

Introducing Circles’ Innovation Engine

Circles’ Innovation Engine develops diverse non-telco offerings for our customers’ digital lifestyles to boost their engagement and retention with our telco apps. 

Focusing on Customer Engagement Creates Upsell Opportunities

The logic behind our Innovation Engine is that higher user engagement with the app increases the likelihood that they’ll spend more on it. This turns apps into valuable assets that generate new and diversified revenue streams and, in turn, increase average revenues per user. 

With how similar many telcos are becoming, McKinsey’s research has noted that great customer experiences, like gamified experiences and loyalty programs, can support longer-term customer relationships. Making these improvements provides more cross-selling offers for both connectivity and non-connectivity services.

They also noted that a personalized approach to offers and pricing for each user can raise customer lifetime value and average revenue per user. Still, more data needs to be captured to achieve this. Capturing this user data needs regular engagement with customers who usually have little reason to interact with telcos other than when experiencing problems.

This is where Circles’ Innovation Engine comes in.

Rapid Testing App Improvements With Real Customers

With how quickly the competitive environment can change, speed is key when building and testing new minimum-viable products and offers on your telco app.

Instead of relying on traditional, slower methods or extensive, costly research that captures customer opinions rather than their actual behaviors, our method helps you rapidly test new minimum viable products (MVP) with real consumer segments. 

This helps you to quickly test and gather customer feedback, giving you actionable insights to adjust and optimize offerings that your customers will love. 

This method has 3-stages from ideation to launching to performance monitoring covered below.

Circles’ 3-Stage Rapid Experimentation Method

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Ideation and Discovery

We will collaborate with your telco brand in the ideation stage to discover and identify new user engagement and interaction opportunities. From our experience, these opportunities include entertainment, gaming, retail, and Fintech, just to name a few.

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We’ll then generate, evaluate and finalize specific offerings and services to launch as minimum viable products (MVPs), based on three success criteria:

• Business potential
• Engagement potential
• Alignment with customer habits and behaviour.

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With a focus on speed, innovation and action, the goal is to finalize around 20 ideas and launch two to three MVPs per quarter.

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Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Live Testing

At the MVP live testing stage, we’ll collaborate with you to rapidly deploy and test MVPs and offers with your target user groups. Feedback and data from these tests help us quickly update each MVP.

The sandbox is built into the telco app. For example, the sandbox that we use for our own telco brand Circles.Life is called Explore.

Circles’ Explore Tab Phone Screenshots:

Rapid Experimentation—This sandbox is built for rapid testing and data collection for multiple MVPs, allowing us to quickly generate actionable insights.

Early Partner Integration—You can select which target groups to test each MVP on. This lets us refine our strategies and tailor our solutions based on your target audience’s feedback and behavior.

Target Experimentation with selected customers - All these tests let us assess what worked and what didn’t. Positive contributions are then kept and rolled out in the next MVP update.

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Stop-Iterate-Scale

The performance of all these MVPs is then assessed in the Stop-Iterate-Scale stage in 4-week intervals. This approach emphasizes rapid iteration, feedback loops, and adaptive decision-making. Reassessments are made every four weeks during the initial three months to ensure only successful MVPs are kept. 

We measure four success criteria:

• Activation: Measured by conversion rates, we examine the percentage of users becoming active participants

A conversion rate of 3% or higher indicates strong momentum, signaling that the MVP is on the right track and ready for further refinement and iteration to achieve the following three success criteria.

• Adoption: Measured as a percentage of the user base, we examine how users adopt and integrate the app’s features into their daily routines.

• Engagement: Measured by time spent on the app, we assess how much user interest and interaction there is. Engagement is also a key indicator of new customer habit formation and development.

• Monetization: Measured by ARPU, we determine how effectively the engaged user base drives financial growth.

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MVPs will be stopped or continued depending on what percentage of its success criteria it hits at each 4-week checkpoint:

• 4 weeks - Stop if <25% success criteria
• 8 weeks - Stop if <50% success criteria
• 12 weeks - Stop if all success criteria are not achieved

Povo2.0’s Innovation Engine Results

Japan’s 2020 telco market was saturated, with historically low customer satisfaction, high capital expenditure costs, and stagnant revenues due to over-the-top messaging and voice services cannibalising voice and SMS revenues.

Japan’s KDDI partnered with us to launch their fully digital telco brand, povo 2.0, whose app is powered by our software. With a focus on customer-centricity, povo2.0 was designed to offer fresh, personalised digital experiences tailored to Japan's growing population of digital natives.

Povo2.0 emphasises ‘revolutionising digital experiences,’ to take that to the next level, we continuously improve the app experience with our Circles Innovation Engine. Our model has achieved the following results:

• 30 percent increased engagement for MVP users vs non-MVP users
• 8 percent average revenue per user (ARPU) increase for MVP users vs non-MVP users.

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We made quite a number of improvements that drove higher engagement. To find out what they are, check out the full Innovation Engine case study.

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Entertainment and Lifestyle MVPs launched on povo2.0 with Circles’

Innovation Engine, with positive engagement and ARPU results

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This is just the tip of the iceberg regarding how we have been helping our  global telco partners. Our full-stack software approach is designed to be customer-centric and provide great features for lean operators. 

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Don’t miss out. Talk to us today!

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