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and preferences. Customer insight is also critical to keeping the best customers; in the age of United 1K, Starwood Platinum, Amazon Prime, and American Express Black, these customers have come to expect a level of premium service.
Flexibility in crafting service bundles is also crucial. How offers are packaged and priced can be as important as the offers themselves. Many service providers still need IT to write code in order to deploy a new service bundle; a surprising number of product offerings necessitate code changes at the customer, billing, provisioning, and integration layers of the architecture. There is no reason for this still to be true. Modern, packaged business and operational support system (BSS/OSS) products allow providers to deploy such offerings with simple configuration changes that marketing personnel and business analysts can often perform. No provider can afford to be without a long-term strategy for agile product rollout, bundling, and pricing across all portions of the systems architecture.
Given a base level of customer insight and the ability to deploy new services and bundled offerings, service providers can concentrate on “mastering the cross-sell.” It is no longer necessary for market analysts to scour the data warehouse, writing endless series of cross-sell and up-sell rules. Self-learning technologies can “learn” what bundles are most successful — and prioritize those bundles for sale. (Think Amazon.com’s ability to tell you that 63% of customers who liked book x also purchased book y.) The same technology allows providers to position the best “retention offers” to help keep disgruntled customers on board.
(3) Customer service isn’t all about the call center. With few exceptions, most customers first experience a carrier’s customer service when they place an order. And since first impressions matter, getting the order right the first time is critical. Once the customer places an order, providers need to provision and bill for it quickly and accurately. Since equipment is often critical to the order, that equipment needs to be available and fulfilled promptly. The customer who goes to a Cingular store looking for an iPhone shouldn’t leave in frustration because the phone is caught up in an inefficient supply chain! In short, the customer experience is defined in large part by how well the
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Simply put, customer care is a holistic discipline across the entire customer life-cycle and systems infrastructure. |
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provider’s systems are integrated and perform as a coherent unit.
Of course, ongoing customer service matters. Increasingly, customers demand electronic billing and payment options and the ability to manage their accounts online. True multi-channel customer service is moving from vision to competitive necessity. The ability to report problems easily and get a resolution quickly is essential; a customer may forgive a momentary service outage, but will never forget long hold times and missed appointments to fix the problem. The same ordering systems need to work seamlessly with service assurance, ticketing, and field service systems to fix problems when they occur.
And sales can be a part of customer service, too. Nothing is more annoying than having an agent try to sell you something you already have or are ineligible to receive.
Simply put, customer care is a holistic discipline across the entire customer life-cycle and systems infrastructure.
The emergence of triple and quad-play services has dramatically raised the stakes on customer retention. In an n-play world, customers buy “all or nothing,” making them simultaneously more valuable and more difficult to attract from competitors. The bundle price still rules. But in a world where the sleekest handset, the hottest content, and the most compelling customer experience can shift whole portfolios of services to competitors, it’s no longer enough to provide reliable services and good customer care. To retain customers, service providers must create the best services, bundle them in the right way, offer them to the right customers at the right price, deliver them fast and reliably, and bill for them clearly and accurately. Customers expect to get the best content and the latest equipment and to be empowered with convenient care options. In short, sophisticated quad-play customers demand a holistic approach to keeping their business. To meet this goal, service providers need to deliver an experience exceeding their customers’ expectations.
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1 Source: Yankee Group, “The Communications Bundle: The Time Is Now,” March 22, 2006
9 BusinessWeek, “AT&T’s New Operator,” June 18, 2007 |
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