The ever increasing selection of connected devices and online services is rapidly changing our communication patterns. The speed at which we embrace digital life is increasing by the day, and communication service providers (CSPs) are facing an ever-growing number of new challenges from traditional competition and OTT alike.
Customers today have come to expect their service experience to be top class across the board and frequent online interactions and full control over their services have been key to the success of OTT service providers who have been instrumental in shaping the digital needs and expectations of customers.
As a result, customer experience is a critical factor in today’s competitive and connected marketplace, with customers achieving more presence, power and choice than ever before. According to Forrester research, 89% of consumers are willing to switch providers as a result of a poor experience; while in the past this would have meant jumping from the frying pan into the fire, the introduction of new OTT service offerings like Google’s Project Fi means there will soon be a real alternative to the services of traditional CSPs. While customers regardless of industry have the right to expect to be well served, many companies now consider Customer Experience Management (CEM) as a key tool to aid in understanding and enhancing every element of the experience to ensure that the customer remains at the centre of all business decisions. With this in mind, it is essential that CSPs too start to take a more wholesome view at customer experience.
In the increasingly smartphone saturated world, telcos now have the opportunity to constantly learn from their customer through smart devices. With real-time customer feedback available in abundance, operators must act fast to put in place the necessary business processes to make use of this information. To act on this, CSPs not only need to take a different approach to their CEM systems but also take a deep, hard look into how the information is put to action for the benefit of their customers. For the most part, customer experience is not an IT problem, but rather a cultural problem.
Naturally, it will help to have in place the necessary IT infrastructure to collect and analyse the vast amounts of customer experience metrics available. To provide an excellent customer experience and to do it efficiently, CSPs need to re-orient their systems and processes to support more integrated product/offer management strategy, complete with the offering creation and order management processes. Essentially, this means establishing infrastructure that can support automated personalised service bundles and subscriptions.
Constant incremental innovation and learning from customer behaviour – whether desired or less so – is a necessary pre-requisite to predicting what the customer will need in the future. Customers from their part want complete visibility and control of their services and quick answers to their queries, not to mention instant activation of services purchased. They expect all the information related to their account to be readily available when they reach out for a CSP’s contact point, whether it is a customer care agent, business partner, point-of-sale representative or web self-care channel.
By providing customers with a rapid and meaningful response to their everyday service needs, operators are presented with an obvious opportunity to differentiate in an environment in a perpetual loop of cost cutting and subsequently degraded service levels. Tecnotree is actively working with our customers across the globe to help in understanding how the information available through the standard BSS stack, as well as additions such as direct customer feedback, can be used to enhance customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle.
The author is Timo Ahomäki, CTO, Tecnotree
Timo Ahomäki is chief technology officer at Tecnotree. He is a seasoned product strategist with 20 years’ experience in telecoms.
