The Personalization Imperative: Driving telecom growth with AI-powered marketing

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC Strategy& Middle East, April 2025

by GP Singh, Mahmoud Makki, Tarek Matar, and Ankit Kushwaha




Customers in every industry are demanding personalized, real-time engagement across channels, whether it is social media, mobile apps, or retail stores online and offline. They expect to be uniquely understood in the moment.

Marketers know that personalization is critical to relevance and differentiation, revenue growth, and brand value. Leaders are tackling this challenge head-on. First, they are gathering massive, proprietary data sets of customer information. Unilever, for example, is on a mission to create 1 billion one-on-one customer relationships by analyzing interactions across digital and in-store touch points for marketing insights. Second, such leaders are creating integrated marketing technology (MarTech) stacks to enable real-time personalization. McDonald’s integrated its MarTech to deliver personalized drive-through menus, mobile app offers, and in-store experiences, increasing its digital customer frequency by 10 percent and raising customer spending. Third, these leaders are exploiting real-time insights to get their concept into the market faster. Such agility allowed Coca-Cola to quickly move from a concept to the production of personalized bottles and cans in its “Share a Coke” campaign, which it launched in Australia and then expanded globally, and grow sales by 2.5 percent in a year in the competitive U.S. market.

Telecom operators are uniquely positioned to fulfill the personalization imperative. Their data sets, which include real-time location data, usage patterns, and customer service interactions, are broader and richer than those of industries such as finance or retail.

The problem is that many telecom operators are struggling to tap this gold mine of insights. In many cases, they are unable to deliver the right offer at the right place and the right time to their customers. We find that telecom companies typically utilize only 30 to 50 percent of their data. Senior telecom executives worry that disconnected MarTech stacks and skills gaps are holding them back.

Data-fueled, AI-powered marketing engines can unlock the potential for personalization. Such engines can produce the insights needed for personalized engagement, promote more informed decisions, and create the precision targeted strategies needed to enhance returns and deliver competitive advantage. Our analysis shows that for telecom companies in the early stages of their customer value management (CVM) journey, every $1.00 invested in AI-powered, data-fueled marketing can yield up to $5.90 in EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) gains over five years. (Read the rest here.)

Unlocking growth in the B2B telecom segment

Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:

PwC, January 2019

by Wilson Chow, Rolf Meakin, Mike Lawley, and Joseph Tagliaferro  

In the past five years, telecom operators have recorded an average compound annual growth rate of -0.4% for their B2B activity. The industry’s cash cows are in decline. These include legacy wireline offerings, such as multiprotocol label switching, plain old telephone service and digital subscriber line services. The catch rates on newer internet-based products have not been high enough to pick up the slack. Moreover, the complexity of the industry’s legacy technology, business and operations support systems has stymied efforts to both reduce costs and bring innovations to market. 

Buyers of B2B telecom services are also frustrated with what they perceive as a lack of responsiveness within the industry — a condition that has resulted in a high level of customer churn. Their dissatisfaction is exacerbated by a demographic changing of the guard: more and more buyers have service expectations set by a lifetime of dealing with digitally native consumer companies such as Amazon and Netflix. They expect service requests and delivery to be fulfilled on demand, and they don’t want to do business with telcos that can’t meet their expectations.

The new competitors, attracted by this combination of industry sluggishness and customer unrest, fall into two broad categories. The first includes companies such as Cisco, Juniper and Brocade; they seek to establish direct relationships with enterprise customers. They expect to do this by building a broad base of customers in the B2B market and selling services that overlap with telcos’ offerings, such as software-based VPNs and firewalls. The second group of competitors, which includes companies such as Amazon and Masergy, is seeking to disrupt the industry in a more fundamental way, less bound to established offerings. These companies are leveraging their agility and digital savvy to create new kinds of customer-centric solutions, test them with early adopters and bring them to market at an unprecedented pace — a pace that telcos struggle to match.

Telecom operators know they have advantages, particularly in their networks and long-established relationships with enterprise customers. They know that to better serve existing customers, win over new ones, reverse declining revenues and stymie competitors, they will need a major shift in their capabilities and outward-facing identity. This requires transformation. But knowing the effort and investment involved in transformations, and the high rates of failure, how can telecom leaders improve the odds for success? Read the rest here.