By Chun-Ling Woon, ConceptWave

Think back to the last time you went in to make a purchase at your local consumer electronics store. The limited range of products in the store may have made it a frustrating experience, or you may have been overwhelmed by the options available but unable to get any assistance from an overextended or untrained sales staff. If you visited a big box store during a peak shopping time, such as the holiday season or over the weekend, you may have been turned away by crowded aisles and long lines, or you may have showed up to find that the store had gone out of business, as many have over the last several months.

Compare that experience to the typical experience of a customer visiting the Apple Store. Apple’s move into the retail store business in 2001 was fueled by Steve Jobs’ desire to be the “gold standard” for how products should be sold, and the Apple Store experience measures up to that goal. Every aspect of a visit to an Apple Store is carefully managed, from the online Concierge system

to make a service appointment to the greeter at the entrance to the process for getting a device repaired or replaced. As a result, when a customer enters an Apple Store, regardless of where it is located or what he is there for, he knows exactly how that visit will go, and he will most likely leave feeling as though he had a positive experience.

Too often, communications service providers are the equivalent of the local retail store. A customer may have multiple ways of communicating with the CSP—for example, a retail store, a reseller, a call center and Web-based chat—but may experience variable pricing information, product availability and support capabilities among these different channels. Similarly, a customer may have multiple services from a single CSP, but find that the CSP cannot generate a single customer view across these services, again creating a fragmented experience. In short, CSPs sorely lack the ability to create the consistent customer experience that Apple has been able to achieve.

manage the service, but manage the process by which the service is consumed, on an end-to-end basis, from the time the subscriber orders the service to the time it is actually delivered—much the way that Apple manages the experience from the time the customer walks in the door of the store to the time he walks out with either his problem solved or a new product.

One considerable hurdle that CSPs face in doing this is the combination of legacy systems that support their operations. Each new service delivered by a Tier 1 CSP has historically required its own service delivery environment and OSS/BSS environment, each with its own representation of the customer, and with little to no integration or visibility among them. Without a unified view of the subscriber—including service profile, usage history identity information and device information—the CSP has no way of treating that customer in a consistent manner. The CSP needs to be able to correlate disparate subscriber information across multiple