Customer Digital Engagement and Lifetime Value: An Empirical Study of Telecom Services in India

Digitalization has posed severe challenges to traditional businesses. Traditional firms are still not sure of the benefits of digitally engaging their customers. In contrast, the new-age firms have successfully leveraged digital media. This article examines the relationship between digital adoption by customers and customer lifetime value (CLV). This study analysed the mobile recharges by 13 million rural and urban prepaid telecom customers over 60 million transactions from January 2019 to June 2019 in the Indian telecom industry. The computed predictive CLV has been computed and compared across various customer segments (digitally engaged, partially digitally engaged and digitally unengaged customers). The studied data were statistically validated using the Kruskal–Wallis test. The data proved to be non-normally distributed as per the Kolmogorov–Smirnov test. The results supported that digital adoption helps increase customer engagement, loyalty and CLV. The study presents several managerial implications, such as digitally engaged customers being a surrogate for high value and more profitable customers. Also, digitally engaged customers are relatively more loyal, contributing higher CLV than digitally unengaged customers.