SINGAPORE: The traditional telco category has a "KPI of frustration" and is ripe for marketing disruption, a senior telco executive in Singapore believes.

"Singapore, as modern a society as it is, is still stuck in 24-month contracts which are built on minutes," said Delbert Ty, brand and marketing lead of Singapore mobile operator Circles.Life, a challenger brand.

(For more on Circles.Life's use of customer data, read WARC's exclusive report: Disrupting Singapore's telco industry with mobile-first, data-driven customer experience.)

"[Customers who exceed data limits] may be good for the bottom line at this point, but that isn't going to be sustainable," he said at the recent MMA Forum Singapore 2017.

He explained that consumers' appetite for all things digital can only get bigger, particularly in Singapore, which has the highest smartphone penetration in the world.

The company's target audience is Singapore's tech-savvy digital natives, a data-hungry group who are the most likely to burn through all their monthly data allowances each month, and who – as Circles.Life co-founder Rameez Ansar has estimated – make up about 15-20% of all mobile consumers in Singapore.

"Our users use on average 40% more data than what the regular Singaporean is using," said Ty.

Leveraging data to create an even better experience for users is where Ty sees the future for telecom companies. "Because everything is digital, we see in real time what people are doing, how people are using our product," he said.

This ability to "continuously iterate the customer experience", as Ty called it, also allows Circles.Life to tweak its product offerings quickly according to customer adoption levels.

"Because of all the primary data that we have, we are able to see what works, what doesn't work. The speed at which feeds things, is not in the months; it's in the weeks and throughout the days, sometimes within hours," he said.

"As we get more users, the more we are able to build our knowledge graph, and the more we are able to create a better experience for our users."

Data sourced from WARC