Take a look at what’s going on in your network through the lens of the customer: Part 2

Jean-Phillipe Goyet, senior director product management
at Guavus

In the first part of this series, I outlined how CSPs are improving service operations by looking at their business through the lens of the customer, says Jean-Phillipe Goyet of Guavus.

We saw that this shift in perception is helping CSPs to uniquely understand the impact service quality has on their most important offering; the customer experience. Now, let’s look at how this new perspective is impacting care operations and how CSPs can better handle customer interactions when things go wrong.

Illuminating the path to contextual care

By creating a holistic analytics layer for the customer journey, CSPs gain far greater insight into the relationship between service quality events and customer interactions. This new generation of Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) is enabling CSPs to evolve beyond simply reacting to network events, and giving them the context to respond proactively and pre-emptively, offering truly personalised care for each customer.

Contact Centre Representatives (CSRs) now have much-needed information to engage sooner in the problem resolution process, whilst gaining valuable insights on looming issues that customers are not even aware of yet.

This in turn is enabling them to improve customer satisfaction by reducing time to understand and triage issues before they become widespread critical problems. As an added benefit, since care is a key driver for OPEX costs, the reduction in average call handling time and incremental first call resolution can significantly impact on boosting CSPs’ margins.

These new capabilities are possible due to a new generation of CEA applications that collect and compute petabytes of events from the entire customer journey, while allowing real-time and on-demand access to relevant enriched data points.

In addition to customer service usage and quality of service measurements, these applications have the ability to capture relevant customer information, such as their device type and whether they are a new customer or chronic caller experiencing frequent problems. This provides CSRs with access to the full context of the customer at the time of interaction, so they can handle the situation with greater confidence and accuracy.

Paving the way for improved self-care

The next step in this journey is the move towards enabling self-care to provide subscribers with greater control over their own experience for billing and technical issue remediation. Currently, there is a disconnect between the customer’s ability to control their data consumption and how they’re charged.

To date, it’s been very difficult for CSPs to provide subscribers with detailed visibility into their usage. However, with the ability to see through the lens of the customer, CSPs are now in a far better position to build a portal that truly enables self-care.

This improved vantage point provides them with the essential data to break down usage by types of application, so subscribers can see exactly where their allowance is being used up. Furthermore, CSPs can combine real-time usage data with machine learned historic and peer patterns, to detect when customer consumption deviates from normal behaviour and automatically trigger an alert preventing the risk of bill shock or fraudulent activity.

Seeing the patterns emerge for preventive and assisted care

Correlating customer experience markers such as support requests or device restarts, with service performance indicators is enabling customer support operations to discover anomalous patterns and implement preventive or assisted care.

For example, automatically discovering when an increase in inbound calls, for a specific set of device owners, is related to a faulty device OS, rather than a coverage issue, is invaluable.

With these newly gleaned insights, CSPs can provide proactive interventions to affected subscribers; notifying them of a problem through a self-care application before they have chance to call in. This not only reduces the pressure on contact centres, it also minimises the impact on OPEX costs.

Ultimately, these are great examples of how breaking down operational silos and looking at the business through the lens of the customer is enabling CSPs to optimise the customer experience. This ability to link customer journey information with service quality events offers unprecedented opportunities for CSPs to create a much stronger competitive edge by offering a superior customer experience.

The author of this blog is Jean-Phillipe Goyet, senior director of Product Management at Guavus.

Comment on this article below or via Twitter: @ VanillaPlus OR @jcvplus

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