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According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications, Information, and Communications in Japan (2021), the Internet utilization rate (personal) was over 80%. The high-speed fixed-line services, which include optical-fiber and high-speed cable television (CATV) services, are available for almost all homes in Japan. During the period of market expansion for high-speed fixed-line services, promoting the benefits of each service attribute to potential users who were not yet using high-speed Internet access was an important strategy for service providers to increase the number of service subscribers. However, as the demand for fixed-line Internet access becomes saturated and the service specifications offered by each service provider become similar, telecommunications market expansion is becoming more difficult (Hajar et al., 2022). The decision-making factors in users’ service preferences become more diverse, making it difficult to promote sales based on characteristics of service attributes of fixed-line services. With the launch of long-term evolution (LTE), broadband wireless access (BWA) (WiMAX), and 5G services, the transmission speed of mobile services has improved, and the difference in transmission speed between fixed-line services and wireless services is becoming smaller. As a result, the number of people who use only wireless services is increasing, and the structure of the telecommunications market, which was previously divided into fixed-line and mobile services, is changing. According to the changes in users’ needs and usage patterns, there are many methods to access Internet, and telecommunication markets are increasingly complicated and diversified. In some cases, a fixed-line service is the component of information technology (IT) service, and a choice of fixed-line service is a result of choice of IT service. In other cases, a fixed-line service is bundled with a wireless service. There are various types of choice sets, and it is very difficult to define the choice set in Internet-access service choice behavior. It is also difficult to construct common Internet-access service choice models based on the service specifications such as charge and transmission speed. The choice sets and their decision-making factors vary from user to user. It is a very important issue to understand the choice behavior of Internet-services for the related providers including mobile carriers, Internet service providers, Internet access line providers, and contents providers. Under these circumstances, both fixed-line carriers and mobile carriers need to formulate strategies to maximize the continuation rate of existing users and effectively reach users who are considering changing from other carriers. If users are divided into two segments, namely, one consists of users who intend to continue and the other consists of users who do not, the current state of the telecommunications market can be grasped by understanding the characteristics of each segment.
The authors have already proposed the supervised learning models to create differential descriptions of the user segments for Internet access choice behavior. The purpose of this paper is to establish a method for extracting effective information for service sales strategies by focusing on users and clarifying the reasons for the differences in current service choice results and future change intentions among users. Therefore, this paper proposes the framework of user intent-based segmentation analysis that suggests service sales strategy that is suitable for each segment, and presents the evaluation examples of Internet access services.
This paper is organized as follows: First, the authors present the market of Internet access services in Japan; next, the authors review related works, and describe the proposed framework of user intent-based segmentation analysis and supervised learning model they have used in this paper; finally, by using original market survey data, the authors present application examples and conclude.