As communications service providers (CSPs) improve their approaches to customer experience management (CEM) by moving towards an omni-channel approach and exploiting contextual awareness, Dr Andy Tiller, the vice president of product marketing at AsiaInfo, tells George Malim the advantages are well understood. However, while the technology is mature, the use cases are not established and CSPs also have barriers to surmount in terms of regulation
VanillaPlus (VP): Omni-channel customer engagement is seen as the key to delivering good customer service experience. What advantages does the omni-channel approach deliver?
Dr Andy Tiller (AT): The key concept is to create a better experience for customer journeys which involve multiple channels. For example, in a customer journey such as purchasing a new phone, upgrade or service, the customer will often want to switch between channels. They may browse online and put items in a shopping basket and then go to a store – with omnichannel they can carry on the process and complete their order in the store without having to start the process all over again. Alternatively, they might begin the process with a Tweet complaining of an issue and receive a response to ring the call centre. When they do so, they’ll typically have to inform the call centre agent of the problem and explain the situation once more, but with omni-channel, the agent can see the interaction history and carry on the conversation. Omni-channel allows the customer to switch channels without starting again. It’s aligned to CSPs’ needs for a single customer view and the customer can also have a record of all their interactions. Those are the basic features of omni-channel but there are sometimes sophisticated requirements as well from a CSP point of view. For example, user behaviour in other channels can affect personalised offers in a new channel. For example, if I respond to a campaign positively, perhaps by liking it on Facebook, an omni-channel system would push me a personalised offer related to the campaign when I log into the CSP’s web shop. The connectivity of all the channels is joined up with analytics and personalisation. A further benefit of omni-channel CEM to a CSP is that it enables them to see what the end customer sees and react to that. If a customer is struggling in a self-care environment, the agent can go in and do the task for them. For example, if a customer has a partially full shopping cart but can’t find the right offer to complete their transaction, an agent can go in and assist them. All of these things are typically still aspirations for CSPs today but there is a lot of activity and interest to create a true omni-channel customer engagement mode.
VP: We’ve spoken about CSPs’ own channels. How does AsiaInfo see the omni-channel concept extending to other channels such as social media platforms?
AT: At AsiaInfo we think CSPs’ own channels are the baseline for them to introduce omni-channel but the next phase is the proper integration of social apps such as Facebook, WhatsApp and WeChat. Those are typically the customers’ preferred ways of communicating, but they are not very useful for interacting with a CSP today. Social media is not really joined up at all to the single customer view and customers can’t do a lot with those channels now. However, the social apps themselves are becoming quite powerful with their open APIs. It should be quite possible for a CSP to offer a full self-care application within a social media app. We’ve essentially re-architected our CRM system so any front end can be plugged in. Usually the problem is that each front end channel has its own data and business process logic. The customer might work through steps one to three of a process in one channel, but if step four is different in a second channel they can’t continue after switching channels; they have to start all over again.
You have to take out the data and business logic from the front end channel and accommodate it within a back end platform that supports all the front end channels. We’ve done that with our CRM product and we have integrated WeChat as a reference example, but you could integrate any social channel. The social channel then becomes much more useful. For example, you could receive a marketing message via WeChat after scanning a barcode on an advert, then start a two-way private conversation about it with an agent in the WeChat app. The conversation history is incorporated into your single customer view, so that you can continue the conversation with an agent in a retail store who already knows that you are interested in the offer you saw in the advert. The example works equally well with WhatsApp or Facebook. WeChat also has a payment capability, so a customer could top up their phone or buy a bolt-on package from within the app. These third party social applications are going to become more capable and there’s an opportunity, even a requirement, for CSPs to add these to their omni-channel customer engagement environment.
VP: Do you see CSPs remaining in control of the customer experience or could OTT providers start to wrest control of the customer experience from CSPs?
AT: I think CSPs will remain in control where they join those channels up to their single customer view and offer omni-channel engagement. The interactions are part of the customer record and if they’re not joined up, they’re not part of the record. I don’t think it’s the intent of the social application providers to steal the experience of ordering a handset or raising a troubleticket with the CSP, they’ve got other things in mind. In this scenario, the social application companies are providing helpful tools. CSPs provide a lot of rich selfcare features in their own apps but there is some evidence that people are reluctant to use them. It’s much more convenient for users to have everything in one application than engage with a CSP self-care application separately from their preferred communications app.
VP: To what extent is real-time self-service empowering customers to personalise their experience? What challenges do CSPs face in enabling real-time self-service?
AT: Real-time self-service is what you do with these self-care channels regardless of whether that is via a social app or through a CSP’s own channel. Topping up or viewing your bill are generic self-service capabilities, but the challenge for CSPs is to personalise the experience more. For example, CSPs might want to personalise a bolt-on package by enabling customers to decide how much they want to spend. A good example of this is in our deployment at mobile operator AIS in Thailand. The CSP has just launched a smartphone application that lets customers do many things. For example, they can decide how much they want to spend on a bolt-on voice and data package and tune the mix of voice (minutes) and data (MB) to their preferred proportions. These types of offering rely not only on an attractive front end but real-time capabilities at the back end. Similarly, if I’ve got some spare data in my monthly bundle, I might want to give it to a friend or family member. I should be able to donate that through a CSP’s app (or even using a social app). There might be a convenience charge for that. I should also be able to convert unused resources, such as leftover minutes, to needed resources, such as data, if I want to – again for a small fee. There are lots of examples of this type of personalisation that is attractive to users and all require a real-time response from the charging and account balance management system at the back end.
VP: How important is it for CSPs to have real-time awareness of their customers’ context?
AT: Generally there’s a strong focus now by CSPs on trying to understand customers’ needs in real-time so they can pre-emptively support them. For example, if my data balance is about to expire and I’m watching YouTube on my phone, rather than send an automatic text saying I have a low balance a CSP can send a message saying click here for a YouTube day pass for €2 – yes or no? That’s a scenario people have talked about for some time but the technology to achieve it is now available. With complex event processing you can identify that the two events – low data balance and watching YouTube – are happening simultaneously for a particular customer, and then orchestrate a response to that specific context, such as the YouTube day pass offer. CSPs want real-time contextual awareness not only for the cross-sell and up-sell opportunities but to serve customers better. For example, a business customer might have had a few dropped calls in a short period of time. A CSP can respond by apologising for the poor network experience and credit the user with 100 minutes. The idea is to turn a negative experience into a positive one by preempting the customer’s complaint. It’s about delighting the user by turning around a situation which would normally upset them.
VP: What barriers exist in relation to CSPs utilising big data insights to create personalised offerings and target customers effectively? What are the regulatory factors and social concerns for CSPs to consider?
AT: The technology to enable this is readily available but the challenge is how to create the right use cases because you can certainly use the technology inappropriately and get the customer experience very wrong. You can upset customers if they feel they’re being spied upon. Typically CSPs have concerns about what they’re allowed to do under the law and regulations in their markets and what customers will find helpful as opposed to spooky. The technology is mature but the use cases are in their infancy. We recently did some market research and found in a survey of 50 CSPs that the key barrier is the regulatory requirements rather than fear of upsetting customers by doing inappropriate things. CSPs feel they’re in control of that but find the regulatory environment more challenging. There is a lot of room for interpretation of what you’re allowed to do and CSPs are concerned by that and typically interpret regulation very conservatively. CSPs feel they have not been allowed a level playing field in comparison to large internet-based competitors in this respect. They want to comply with the law but feel it should be clearer, simpler, and the same rules should apply to all players.
