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With so much riding on a satisfying customer experience, service providers need to have highly consistent and efficient processes for service introduction to accelerate time to market. It’s now crystal clear that commoditization and “me too” is not sufficient to attract and maintain customer loyalty. Therefore, business planning and market development must assume far shorter life cycles for service and content offerings. Providers can no longer be dependent on single source integrated vendors who provide both the network equipment and services that run on them. Rather, they need a network-independent service delivery platform that is able to rapidly exploit new fads and market trends like user participation as well as opt-in, context-relevant advertising to supplement subscription revenues.
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Is the underlying technology platform conducive for the rapid intake, packaging and provisioning of content customized to the whims of the fickle audience? |
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Moreover, with content originating in, and served up to multiple domains, technical barriers to life cycle management must be obliterated. Today, the norm calls for seamless inclusion of content and services from the web, broadcast sources, and a range of content owners as diverse as the
Internet. Individual service silos and their respective OSS can no longer be tolerated in a business dependent on meeting customer satisfaction, because it is simply too
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On the operations side, the complexity posed by greater customer choice and rapid provisioning is taxing the back office operations in an unprecedented fashion.
In the past, customer dissatisfaction was most pronounced as a result of two variables – service disruption and billing errors. Today, customers walk with their feet when they are less than satisfied with a whole range of factors that impact the life cycle of services and support. The same holds for suppliers of content and 3rd parties like marketing partners. To ensure accurate settlement and billing in this far more complex digital merchandising model, OSS must achieve a new level sophistication for automated mediation and settlement of debits and credits. One potential scenario might be a barter arrangement via 3rd parties like PayPal, who would provide credit on purchases from an affiliate like eBay.
Toward a New Business Model
In a business solely focused on customer satisfaction and retention, OSS isn’t merely an internal management tool, but in fact it is now expected to perform an unprecedented level of complex back office operations while simplifying tasks by customer support staff and end users who rely on portals for self care and purchasing decisions. It is a lynchpin for building and retaining customer loyalty.
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cumbersome to manage services, content and support in such a fashion.
To transition to the new market realities, senior managers must ask themselves whether their business is organized for this fundamentally different service model. Are internal organizations that are responsible for IT and network operations aligned to best meet customer needs without causing customer confusion or delay in service and content delivery? Is the underlying technology platform conducive for the rapid intake, packaging and provisioning of content customized to the whims of the fickle audience?
There has to be a fundamental review of the entire workflow to determine how to maximize customer satisfaction and retention. A well-considered organizational model, combined with the appropriate service delivery platforms optimized for the inevitable convergence, offer the most effective means for achieving these desired results. The closed loop feedback available with metadata-enabled OSS can be exploited by sales and marketing functions to drive change, reduce internal confusion about accountability, while defining areas of new business opportunity. This is the recipe for success in a service provider business that is focused on customer satisfaction.
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