It’s Not About the Network – Customers Reign Supreme in Future Communications Market

In the telecommunications market services are transitioning from simple voice and data communication towards more personalized, multimedia based services delivered over many different access channels. In the consumer market, communications service providers (CSPs) are moving from mobile voice and messaging services to more advance multimedia services that provide internet browsing, music downloads, and video services. The CSPs that deliver a unique, superior telecommunications service can expect loyal customers willing to pay more for the service.

CEM is the ability to manage each interaction between the subscriber and the CSP in the order, fulfillment, billing, customer care, and assurance of services consumed. CEM is a strategic approach taken by the CSP to augment business processes and integrate a myriad of data sets and software systems to positively impact the subscribers’ experience. In order for a business to assess the customer experience, each interaction must be managed across each part of the business where the customer evaluates, orders, uses, and makes payment for the product or service.

The market forces increasing the awareness of customer experience are in part being driven by the commoditization of telecoms services – primarily voice and the threat posed by new participants in the telecommunications economy that offer premium services over a broadband network. The threat posed by new participants in the economy that offer premium services over a broadband network is accelerating investments in CEM. CSPs are investing billions of dollars in capital to provide convergent mobile and fixed broadband services to consumers and businesses but this has not led to improvements in customer loyalty, which is reflected in price concessions and churn in mature segments of their business. Despite the incumbent status held by most tier-1 and tier-2 CSPs that serve millions of broadband and mobile subscribers, CSPs have acknowledged that their ability to assess customer satisfaction is limited. In many cases subscriber information is scattered throughout different parts of the organization making it difficult to gain a unified view of the customer. At the same time the convergence of services brings with it technology and operational challenges. Instead of a single domain to manage, now CSPs are faced with managing a tenfold increase in network and information technology (IT) domains.

CEM has many facets because to effectively manage the customer experience, different types of interactions between the customer and the CSP will occur over the lifecycle of the customer. The areas that CSPs are actively investing in CEM include call center customer care, which entails threading together incidents to avoid churn, order to activation of new services, self service channels, service and network performance in real time, application transaction monitoring, mobile device management, more precise marketing of new services, and personalization.

In my next blog I will talk about several scenarios where CSPs are actively making investments.