How Personalization is Shaping the Future of Telecom Offerings
Speaker: Maxim Nartov, Chief Business Officer, Nexign
Recently, one of our clients, a Tier-1 communications service provider (CSP) serving more than 70 million customers, reduced the number of its plans by 30% while successfully migrating 60% of its subscriber base to personalized offerings. Which product management approaches within the BSS system enabled achieving this on such a large scale? The answer to this question lies within the concept of catalog-driven personalization.
The telecom industry, at its core, is a loyalty-driven business: customer acquisition costs continue to rise, traditional communication channels are losing effectiveness, and the market is increasingly saturated. That is why loyalty remains the central focus. Customer loyalty strongly depends on a personalized offering: modern consumers want to receive only the tailored services they expect. However, personalization also works for CSPs, as it allows them to concentrate on revenue-generating activities, thereby improving overall business efficiency.
Personalization as Key to Customer Engagement and Business Optimization
Service personalization has become a matter of survival for any industry. CSPs are actively developing tools and flexible mechanisms that allow them to create new products on the fly—for example, offering tailored data plans or custom discounts that can be seamlessly integrated into a base plan. This trend is now evolving into its next phase. Given the lowering margins in the telecom industry, personalization is not only a response to customer demand but also a potential barrier to optimizing internal operations. The key challenge lies in striking the right balance: delivering the personalized services customers want while keeping costs under control. From a management standpoint, the focus should shift from a traditional “easy way” of multiplying new products to enhancing and refining flexible configuration mechanisms that enable ongoing adaptability.
Developing a personalized service is a full-cycle process that requires careful execution. It starts with identifying customer needs, analyzing their consumption patterns, and creating the most relevant offer. This approach is most often applied when creating personalized propositions for existing customers, as it boosts both revenue and loyalty.
It is also important to remember that each personalized product requires ongoing operational support. A mid-sized operator typically maintains thousands of plans in its portfolio. Adjusting them—whether through personalization, campaign-driven modifications, or even straightforward repricing—demands significant input from already overloaded IT teams. Such changes can take months to implement, ultimately complicating product management processes. As complexity grows, the BSS will reach its limits, making personalization economically unsustainable and severely undermining the operator’s competitiveness. This is why efficient and scalable personalization is only possible when a CSP leverages a catalog‑driven approach to product management within its BSS if and when it supports a proper level of charging flexibility and configurability.
Scalable Personalization in Action: Use Cases from Tier-1 Operators
Flexibility and ease of configuration are critical for both subscribers and operators. One of our clients, for instance, was a pioneer in the market many years ago, introducing a solution that allowed customers to select the number of minutes, gigabytes, and text messages they wanted, add options for unlimited data for selected applications, and instantly see the calculated price of such a fully personalized offering. The key factor is ensuring subscribers feel empowered to configure the services they want themselves.
At the same time, operators must have the ability to design product offerings through modular, Lego-like product entities. This model lays the foundation for accelerating the launch of innovative marketing ideas that drive customer acquisition. For example, one of our clients, a Tier-1 operator with tens of millions of subscribers, can instantly make any customer’s plan “sharable” or “family”—without coding or duplicating product entities in the BSS. Another notable case is a recently launched service unique in the market and rarely available worldwide: during number portability, the operator allows customers to fully copy their existing plan from a competitor. The subscriber retains all key parameters of their current plan—subscription fee, voice minutes, and data volume—even if no equivalent exists in the operator’s catalog. The migration is processed seamlessly online via the app or in retail stores.
Another our client, a Tier-1 operator serving millions of clients, has introduced personalized plans to strengthen customer loyalty, migrating 60% of its subscriber base to personalized offerings, and streamline its plan portfolio, reducing it by 30%. The plan has a fixed core that defines the included basic services, applicable limitations, compatibility rules, and billing specifics. On top of this core, variable parameters are applied and dynamically calculated by the Big Data system according to each subscriber’s usage patterns. These include data volume, voice minutes, subscription type, and optional add-on products. This approach enables true personalization without adding complexity to the overall offering structure. From a technological perspective, the operator utilizes SID-based product management within the Nexign BSS product catalog to shorten time-to-market for new offerings and enable faster adaptation to evolving customer needs.
Technologies for Improved Personalized Offerings
Telecom operators leverage a broad set of next‑generation technologies to design and deliver personalized subscriber services. For instance, artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics are critical for maintaining loyalty. AI enables advanced and more automated personalization for customers. By building dynamic subscriber profiles, AI systems can apply machine learning to segment the customer base, automatically generate personalized recommendations such as Next Best Offers, and provide marketers with insights for designing new products tailored to specific customer segments.
In turn, 5G Standalone (SA) introduces advanced capabilities that significantly enhance the potential for service personalization in telecommunications. One of its key technological opportunities, network slicing, enables operators to dynamically allocate network resources and tailor quality of service (QoS) for diverse applications. This creates a wide range of use cases: for instance, autonomous vehicles can leverage telecom APIs to request latency, bandwidth, and reliability parameters essential for safe operation, while some CSPs already offer pre-configured network slices that B2B clients can purchase and customize to meet their specific requirements.
Personalization opportunities are not limited to 5G but can also be applied within pre-5G service models. In markets where 5G has not yet been rolled out, operators are already offering services that enable subscribers to enhance connection quality on demand. For example, customers can activate an add-on to their existing plan that instantly boosts connection speed by 50%. This capability appeals to premium users and is especially relevant for mission-critical B2B and B2G use cases. From a technological perspective, the service leverages Nexign PCRF and Nexign RCAF, which make it possible to identify subscribers connected to congested base stations and dynamically reallocate network resources. This ensures that customers who have opted for the premium feature receive prioritized connectivity. Indeed, in 5G SA environments, such capabilities can be delivered in an even more seamless and native manner.
Conclusion: The Future of Personalization
When we look toward the future, it becomes clear that telecom services will increasingly be tailored to the specific needs of individual products and use cases. For instance, cost-efficient connectivity may be provided for IoT devices, ultra-high speeds will be crucial for online gaming, while moderate bandwidth will be sufficient when a phone is only receiving messages and notifications. This approach is both convenient for customers and enables operators to maximize network efficiency, ultimately improving profitability.
Telecommunications will continue to evolve in this direction, shifting our perception of connectivity from a simple utility to a complex, demand-driven service. Already, customers value that specific services run seamlessly at the right speed and quality whenever they need them. Step by step, the industry is advancing toward this more dynamic and flexible model of service delivery.
For telecom, the next stage of evolution lies in adopting an end-customer value model. The industry is shifting from the old approach of fixed data packages—such as 1 GB, 3 GB, or 5 GB—toward offerings like lag-free streaming, personalized bundles, and customizable service options. In today’s market, the critical success factor is rapid reconfigurability. It is essential that core business systems, such as BSS and charging systems, support the operator’s ability to adapt rapidly and launch relevant, engaging services to the market ahead of competitors.
Equally important, the automation of personalization will continue to evolve not only in the B2C segment but also in B2B, where a tailored approach is widely regarded as the baseline expectation for service delivery.