Telco
Customer Segmentation
An 8 percentage point prepaid market outperformance over three years, delivered by replacing volume-driven SIM acquisition with CLV-led channel targeting.
The client was a telecommunications provider in Singapore, competing for share of a saturated, multi-operator prepaid mobile market. Prepaid was a core acquisition channel and a visible measure of commercial health, closely watched by leadership and reported on regularly.
A recent change to Singapore's telecommunications regulations reduced the number of prepaid SIM cards a customer could acquire. Gross SIM sales fell as a direct result, and the fall showed up immediately in the client's sales reporting.
The business read this as a sales performance problem. With significant internal pressure to lift sales, leadership needed to know, quickly and with confidence, why sales were going down and what to do about it. The client asked us to review and rebuild their sales reporting, validate what was actually driving the numbers, and give the sales team the visibility to track progress against target.
Two constraints shaped the engagement. First, any conclusion had to hold up in front of a leadership team under pressure for a simple, immediate explanation, not a hedge. Second, the answer couldn't be a one-off analysis: it had to run at the pace of the business, week to week and month to month, so the sales team could see whether they were actually improving.
The engagement moved from "explain the number" to "fix the strategy behind the number":
Sales reporting rebuild
Designed week-on-week and month-on-month sales reporting for the sales team, giving them real-time visibility against target that hadn't existed before.
Diagnostic validation
Used the new reporting to test the assumption that sales were genuinely declining, separating the mechanical effect of the SIM acquisition ceiling from any underlying change in commercial performance.
CLV and acquisition cost segmentation
Segmented the customer base by customer lifetime value and by acquisition cost across channels, to see where sales effort was actually being spent and what it was returning.
Tenure and channel analysis
Cross-referenced acquisition channel and cost against customer tenure. This showed the current channel strategy was weighted toward high-cost channels and low-tenure customers, meaning the same customers were being replaced repeatedly, inflating both cost and the volume of sales effort needed just to stand still.
Segment discovery
Identified an underserved, high-value segment: long-term non-citizen residents who couldn't qualify for postpaid due to visa or credit status, with a genuine and recurring need to call family overseas. High usage, high value, low churn, and because they weren't leaving, they only needed to be acquired once.
Sales and channel transaction data fed a new weekly and monthly reporting layer built for the sales team. That reporting was used to validate how much of the visible sales decline was a mechanical effect of the regulatory SIM ceiling, rather than a genuine drop in commercial performance. In parallel, the customer base was segmented by CLV and acquisition cost by channel and tenure, surfacing where acquisition spend was concentrated and what it was actually delivering. That analysis identified a specific underserved segment, which fed directly into a revised channel acquisition strategy.
The rebuilt reporting answered leadership's question directly: the visible decline was largely a mechanical consequence of the new SIM acquisition ceiling, not a loss of commercial performance. That gave the business the confidence to stop chasing volume it could no longer legally recover, and to redirect strategy instead.
Reallocating channel acquisition toward the identified high-value, low-churn segment reduced both cost to serve and the need for constant re-acquisition. Over the following three years, this repositioning helped the client outperform other operators in the local prepaid market by approximately 8 percentage points.
A reported decline is not the same as a real one.
When the reporting environment itself changes, in this case a regulatory shift, diagnosing the actual driver before reacting is what separates a solvable problem from a false alarm.
Volume and value are not the same target.
Chasing gross SIM sales rewarded high-cost, high-churn acquisition. CLV-based segmentation showed the value was concentrated somewhere the existing channel strategy wasn't looking.
The best segment is often the one being missed, not the one being served hardest.
The highest-value opportunity here was structurally excluded from postpaid, and so was effectively invisible to a strategy built around prepaid as the default option rather than the preferred one.
Reporting cadence is what makes analysis usable.
A single point-in-time study wouldn't have survived contact with a sales team under pressure to hit targets every week. Week-on-week and month-on-month visibility gave the business a way to keep testing the strategy as conditions changed.
Next steps
Know, and act!
If your sales numbers don't match your instincts, or your acquisition strategy is chasing volume instead of value, let's talk about finding the segment you're missing.