Faced with fierce competition and churn, telecom service providers in the region are forced to overhaul customer experience to stay ahead in the game.
Improving custo
mer experience remains the holy grail for most telecom service providers. Seen as the key to attracting and retaining new customers, reducing churn and increasing profit, how to do it well is an ongoing subject of research, analysis, investment and intense scrutiny.
There’s no doubt that customer relationship management (CRM) has played a critical part in defining the customer relationship landscape in recent years. Yet, finding a way to measure and quantify the customer experience, including forecasting dollar spend, mapping unique spending patterns and accessing a transparent ROI for individual customers, has remained elusive.
Many CIO’s are now faced with the dilemma of existing legacy CRM systems which track these segments as independent data — but can’t connect them into the useful customer intelligence their sales and marketing colleagues are demanding.
Data such as caller details, preferred bill paying cycles, demographics and market interests is currently locked up in individual silos. The difficulty lies in penetrating the barriers of the silos, so that the data merges into one useful stream.
Fortunately, accessing the silos is getting easier. New technology in the form of customer experience management solutions are becoming available that can work alongside CRM systems, transforming individual silos of information into a holistic, predictable and ultimately profitable analysis of customer intelligence.
What is the driving the need for customer experience management among telcos? “In markets with increasing competitive pressures, operators are challenged to differentiate themselves in the market place, especially if differentiation through lowering price has reached non-sustainable levels. “Enhanced service quality” is often pointed to as a key differentiator, and therefore elevates the topic of Customer Experience Management to a strategic priority,” says Andreas Krenn, Market Development Director, EP Mobile Broadband, Ericsson.
Farid Faraidooni, Chief Commercial Officer, Du, says customer experience has always been a strategic priority not only for telecom companies but every type of organisation, industry, or sector. “The ultimate goal is to have a customer-centric DNA; it is all about putting customers first in everything the organisation does and deliver and making sure all the activities are around the basic objective of delivering superior customer experience and value. Customer experience is a journey, a true cultural change that requires leadership involvement, commitment and a focused long term efforts, it is a mindset, skill set, knowledge, processes, and empowerment, it is a change in the organisation from product-centric, technology-centric, process-centric to customer-centric and employee engagement and empowerment.”
Fady Younes, Client Director, Cisco UAE, agrees that customer experience management is absolutely a priority for most telcos nowadays. “In fact, many service providers have set customer experience or customer excellence as a top company priority and have implemented organisation changes creating focused teams on customer experience. Having the adequate tools in place to support their initiatives and measure results is extremely important,” he adds.
Ravi Mali, Regional Director of Tellabs, says CEM has evolved over time. The first and most basic form of CEM was having a reliable connection and managing that connection. The next CEM driver was capacity management. With the advent of the Internet, CEM evolved into knowing and managing what traffic was passing through the operator’s network. “Now with the proliferation of smartphones, CEM has evolved into managing subscriber behaviour in mobile environments. CEM now has to deal with all types of IP networks and needs to measure on an on-going basis how subscribers are using their phones – whether that’s ‘best effort’ for certain applications or ‘always on’ for application dedicated devices,” he says.
Increasing revenues and profits while anchoring customer loyalty via a proven and quantified improved customer experience is a win-win proposition for telcos, especially in the markets in the Middle East which are teetering on the edge of saturation.
“Most people own at least one, if not two, mobile phone. It is ever more crucial to have in-depth and instant knowledge of what people say about the operator, what the users want and complain about, and how customers rate the products and services of the company and its competitors. Telecom operators work with crowds of customers whose positive or negative experience while using the operator’s services can rise or ruin company’s reputation and the whole business in the market,” says Alexander Zarovsky, Head of Business Development, InfoWatch.
Many industry experts agree customer experience and satisfaction also hinges on the network quality. Mali from Tellabs says good CEM is required as a fundamental business capability in an operator’s network and improve the quality of experience for users. Operators need to know how their network is performing to keep customers happy. The question now becomes “How can this be done better?” What is measured and how it is measured are the items that drive differentiation, he adds.
Krenn says thought network quality is becoming increasingly important, it is only one component accompanied by many more. “Embracing this fact and centering the focus on the consumer requires change in an operator’s organisation, processes, culture and more which, if implemented in a serious manner, also requires additional investment. Without the necessary investment, the topic of CEM remains a just buzzword on the operators’ agendas and has no actual impact on customer experience.”
The industry research firm Ovum says the market for CEM solutions is gaining momentum and investments in this area are likely to pick up in the next 12-18 months. According to Ovum survey Telco Business and Investment Trends for IT, improving customer experience was a high priority for 68% of respondents.
It goes on to add that vendors can increasingly cash in on telcos’ growing need to automate business processes to enhance the customer experience, improve retention, and boost the bottom line. Such initiatives require investments in subscriber data management, advanced analytics, decision automation, identity management, social media platforms, and knowledge management, which will create further vendor opportunities.
CEM is slowly emerging a must-have rather than a nice-to-have in a very highly competitive telecom market. “In order to remain competitive in an increasingly commoditised market where operators are struggling to cope with the OTT players threat, exponential data traffic growth and increasing service complexity, they must focus and invest in Customer Experience Management (CEM) as a platform for driving differentiation and customer retention. Not having the proper setup in place will impact the service provider image, will result in a negative customer experience and will therefore lead to churn,” warns Younes.
The writing on the wall is clear. CEM draws a line between the subscriber’s experience and the operator’s business, and it can make it easier for a carrier to take action that will improve its bottom line or the product it offers. Ignore it at your own peril.
