Business Making Progress

Your (not so) Typical Customer

Right now, your customer has 500 emails in his inbox, 20 voicemails on his phone, 85 percent of his DVR box is full. She has 25 apps uploaded on her iPhone (of which she only uses five on a daily basis). More often than not, he’s texting, emailing, watching CNN and eating all at the same time. She’s on the road 30 weeks a year and is constantly searching for a Wi-Fi connection. Yes, these customers may be typical high-powered executives, but they certainly don't want their CSP to treat them as anything like “typical.” They want a personalized experience, they want to be understood, and they want to know that someone is out there, listening and supporting them.

As competition continues to increase, treating customers as individuals (as opposed to a generic group, or worse, just another up-sell opportunity) will become a key differentiator for providers. Service providers will need to focus on understanding and anticipating customers’ needs. To do this, they must leverage technology that helps them understand and cater to the needs of customers' situation or location, their likes and dislikes. In other words, providers need to see the whole picture when it comes to their customers, and the only way they can achieve this is by marrying a customer's individual profile with their real-time usage call patterns to obtain a clear end-to-end visibility into customers' unique situations. 

With competition steadily increasing, the ability to offer real-time personalized services, which are more useful than simple location-based promotions, will become a key differentiator for service providers. Only by gaining the complete view of the customer can CPSs hope to present tailored services that will appeal to, and make a difference for, their customers.

It’s this type of personalized service that will keep customers loyal and help providers maintain and grow market share in the future.  

 

 

Customer Service is a Matter of Visibility

Given the proliferation of service options and add-ons available to today’s mobile user, keeping the customer happy is a task that has become more and more challenging in recent years. As the number of customer services options increase and diversify, the number of disparate business and operational systems involved in that customer’s experience has also  increased. As we all know, the backend is not one network and one system, as dozens of legacy and new systems need to integrate to provide one unified view of the customer.   

It is possible to manage the end-to-end customer experience, but visibility is key. The best way to achieve this holistic view is to bring all customer-impacting activities together. Only with a comprehensive view of all systems can SPs begin to solve customer problems on one call.  

This complete service view will become the single biggest point of competitive differentiation for mobile providers in the coming year. To prevent churn, providers need to respond to business events as they happen, allowing them to proactively address and fix network issues before the customer suffers from poor service and is left with no one to call but the competition.

 

 

 

 

Can CSP really turn to CEM to help reduce churn?

With the market for cellular customers now saturated across most of the developed world, retaining existing customers has become a major priority for mobile operators. This is because it is demonstrably more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to attempt to win new ones from their competitors.

This is good news for subscribers too, as it means that operators are working hard to provide them with the best possible user experience in order to retain their user base. Various analyst research and media announcements at this week's TM World Management forum in Dublin  has shown that the rapidly growing number of smartphone users are the most demanding in their expectations, and also generate the highest ARPU, so operators are focusing their efforts firstly on keeping this sector happy. According to a keynote from Facebook EMEA director of operations Colm Long, over 80 per cent of telecoms operators are claiming that having Facebook on their platform is imperative.

For this reason, it is my view that this is why tools that provide a holistic customer experience management (CEM) view are now being widely sought. These solutions can enable communication service providers to continuously monitor and manage their customers proactively, and in real time, through one interactive interface. The objective of CEM is to firstly reduce order fall out, then establish and validate the overall quality of service and billing experience of mobile customers. This is in addition to providing an insight into the types of users and devices that are being used to access data services. If specific customers appear to be having a less-than-ideal user experience, the service provider can not only improve the level of service experience for them but also target special offers that may encourage loyalty. If Dublin has taught us one thing this week, it is that there is growing pressure mounting on service providers to manage and grow the revenue from their customer base. For this reason alone, using some form of CEM solution for a more granular insight into customer activity is becoming increasingly important moving forward.