In a recent Frost and Sullivan poll, 96% of communication service provider executives agreed that their organisation needs to undergo transformation. This is especially true for OSS/BSS where, for many providers, their IT environments no longer reflect business reality. The question therefore becomes not whether such transformation is required, but one of what to prioritise, write Christoffer Andersson, vice president, and Chris Yeadon, director of product marketing, Billing and Customer Care – Ericsson.
In a recent Frost and Sullivan poll, 96% of communication service provider executives agreed that their organisation needs to undergo transformation. This is especially true for OSS/BSS where, for many providers, their IT environments no longer reflect business reality. The question therefore becomes not whether such transformation is required, but one of what to prioritise, write Christoffer Andersson, vice president, and Chris Yeadon, director of product marketing, Billing and Customer Care – Ericsson.
Given this choice, certain providers will opt to respond to increased competition, in particular from the new ‘over-the-top’ internet-based market entrants, by fully exploiting some of their most valuable, but hitherto underutilised, core assets such as network and customer intelligence to provide the optimum customer experience
Consumer expectations and demands
Ideally, we know that each OSS/BSS should reflect the requirements of the business environment, but how many existing support systems really do? Network advancements, new handset device technology, and high speed ubiquitous connectivity all have the potential to transform lifestyles and how business is conducted. We need only to look at the convenience and mobility provided by mobile broadband, or devices such as the Amazon Kindle to see how day-to-day life and habits are being changed.
Customers are increasingly dependent on communications, however they increasingly take for granted the intrinsic value of connectivity. Therefore providers will be challenged to include greater personalisation, context, simplicity, choice and control in the services they offer and the billing and support they provide, in order to add any value to their customers’ experience.
The ability to understand what a specificcustomer wants or needs is central to resolvingthis, as the consumer demands complete flexibility from their provider, most prominently in the choice and range of permutations of services available to suit their lifestyle. For example, one user might pay a premium for all YouTube traffic to be flat rate, while another prefers to control the download speed being paid for.
Offering the right choices can be achieved using insights gained through Business Intelligence (BI) and analytics. These make it possible to customise offerings based on location and usage, mobile device characteristics, and even to provide advertising that is targeted, relevant and actually perceivedas a valuable service, instead of being an irritant. Even the traditional bill, when deliveredin this context, can become a logical and targeted advertising and promotional tool.
If providers can supply this kind of high-context personalised service, consumers will increasingly demand more. Multi-play providers today offering fixed, mobile, broadband and TV may become serviceaggregators extending their portfolio to include utilities such as gas, electricity and water in their one-stop offerings. Over time, this gives the provider the advantage of an increasingly loyal customer base, less churn and potentially a much greater share of the consumer’s wallet.
Unlocking the core assets
So how can OSS/BSS deliver this next generation customer experience? The data residing in OSS/BSS systems represents perhaps the single most valuable asset that a provider possesses and which, leveraged in the right way, has the potential to transform the customer experience and the dynamics of their relationship with the provider.
The challenge facing providers is to transform their OSS/BSS architectures in a way thatenables them to identify, transform and analyse this data and make it available in an intuitive form to the various customer facing channels, such as customer support, sales and marketing.
Business Intelligence and analytics can unlock the providers’ knowledge, for example, of how to identify and maximise value from their most valuable and loyal customers, predict behaviour such as churn and decide which products and services to offer. Customer Care Agents (CCAs) are in a great position to up-sell but need the right, non-intrusive information to give the customer a premium feeling and hence increase the probability to add value.
With BI and analytics designed specifically for telecom applications, the CCA will be able to answer questions such as what, when, where, why and how customers are – or are not – using certain services so they can better understand, anticipate and influence customer behaviour to maximise revenue.
Increasing customer transparency
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is concerned with providing as holistic and transparent a view of the customer as possible and optimising a relationship which is intended to be developed over time. Or as motivational speaker Patricia Fripp puts it: "You don't close a sale, you open a relationship, if you want to build a long-term successful enterprise."
For a provider, the aim is to offer as much actionable information as possible to the customer facing channels in order to provide the most personalised and relevant experience possible. To this end, a common IT objective is to integrate their charging and billing systems with CRM in order to obtain a fully holistic view of the customer.
But the next generation CRM system should not only offer a holistic view of the customer but also of the experience the customer has had with their provider. From an OSS/BSS perspective, this could include integration of device management applications to enable verification of device settings against reported customer problems, and if necessary over-theair reconfiguration. This could include the integration of applications that provide intelligence about the customer’s network performance experience, as predictive analytics based on this can accurately determine an individual customer’s propensity to churn.
Rendering OSS/BSS functionality and data in an intuitive and actionable format within a common CRM environment is what will truly enable this next generation customer experience. Imagine if a complaining customer could telephone their provider, and be directly connected with a CCA, without having to navigate through an IVR or voice-recognition menu. Based on computer-telephony integration, the CCA knows exactly who they are, the services they subscribe to, their payment behaviour and complaint history, but moreover their propensity to churn or their priority based on the analysis of their probable life-time value.
This additional intelligence could help a CCA quickly verify, diagnose and solve the customer’s real grievance. More importantly, fast and satisfactory problem resolution could be transformed into an opportunity, whereby a potentially high spending customer is offered an attractive retention package or included in a future targeted marketing campaign. All this can be performed as a closed loop interaction, without traditional recourse to second line technical support and the consequential customer frustration.
Shaping the next generation customer experience
The opportunity to shape a next generation experience based on increased transparency of the customer is therefore very powerful. The potential integration of OSS/BSS application unctionality and data along with predictive analytics concerning service, loyalty and churn could offer a completely superior customer experience.
Yesterday’s CRM systems lacked this telcospecific integration and the deep insights possible from combining valuable, but underutilised, OSS/BSS data with device management, revenue management and analytic systems.
Next generation CRM solutions will incorporate these insights, fully exploiting the customer transparency revealed using business intelligence and analytics, to lower churn and leverage the up-sell, thereby empowering the service provider of the future to shape this winning next generation customer experience
Making your customers transparent: The key to delivering the next generation customer experience
