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.  

 

 

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.

From location based to situation based services: What are the key differentiators for the mobile operator?

Location-based services (LBS) have found their way to the heart of the mobile value proposition. According to the analyst firm Forrester, 30 per cent of European online consumers with mobile phones are interested in using mobile GPS/navigation services, while 52 per cent of Smartphone owners with unlimited mobile Internet packages already do so. While the prominence of LBS is clear,  I'm concerned that the traditional LBS model doesn't have enough local efficiency built into the system to scale geographically. 

This means that as networks sell to advertisers and attempt to match them to a publisher network, very few of those ads carry any LBS at all. Those that offer "local" targeting have meant city and, in some cases, area code – which is fine for tests but doesn't warrant a premium for location. In light of this, how are the new locations- and context-based technology now available different from traditional LBS, and how does it provide the operator with more fine-grained visibility into user activity? 

New situation-aware technology translates specific contexts into logical situations, like ‘being in a car that is almost out of fuel’. If a system knows such a situation, it is able to deliver the user more specific information. As a result, operators are now able to continuously monitor millions of users who are generating events depending on their situations. This is in contrast to the traditional LBS model, which sent users information purely on their location, not based on what they were doing when at the location. As a result of having this enhanced visibility into user behaviour, operators will now be able to target more accurate location-based advertising and promotions based on the users' usage patterns when they are at a specific location.

So in light of the continued interest in LBS, it’s worth asking: would you rather have a location-based service, or will situation-aware based technologies soon be top of mind?