Sprint: Better Data Key to Transformation

Digital transformation doesn't just mean moving operations online. Even with the budget and culture to support it, true "transformation" is not possible without the right data -- and a way to make sense of it.

This is the lesson Sprint Corp. (NYSE: S) learned about six months into its transformation process, the US wireless operator's Chief Digital Officer Rob Roy told McKinsey in a recent interview. Only when it started over with a focus on the data that helped Sprint understand customer behavior and eliminate unknowns did the transformation started to take hold.

As Roy explains it to McKinsey, Sprint first found "lookalikes" or an algorithmically assembled group of people who resembled an existing group based on the customer segments it deemed most valuable and layered this data over time with demographics, behavior, age, current carrier, location and other elements. It then overlaid those insights with data from its website, mobile app, stores and call centers to get the complete customer picture. Sprint stored all the data in a Hadoop environment where it's easy to extract.

Sprint's now teaching bots to become more contextually relevant with their interactions with customers based on all this intertwined data. By doing so, they can understand things like churn and buying habits.

"We learned that people really value the facts that allow them to drive results, so we focused just on delivering facts, not opinions," Roy told McKinsey. "What we’ve been able to do is lay intelligence and facts over people’s personal experience."

Sprint also made some key hires to drive the transformation, including a head of business intelligence and a head of artificial intelligence, which Roy says were the most important hires, along with a business lead for digital adoption and a digital DMP owner to "ingest traditional data and tie it to digital opportunities." As the CDO, Roy's job is to empower these key leaders to succeed at Sprint, he says, and to drive changes like bringing all of the carrier's disparate data into one source that's easily accessible for the entire company.

Check out Roy's entire Q&A with Barr Seitz of Digital McKinsey and McKinsey’s Marketing & Sales Practice right here.

— Sarah Thomas, Contributing Editor, Telco Transformation