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How do you do it? After spending dollar upon dollar on advertising and promotions and freebies for new customers and network buildout and everything else involved in providing service, you've finally secured your customers. Now how do you hold onto them? How do you keep them in your company's fold, rather than losing them to that feared beast: Churn.

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Plenty of exciting things happened in the telecom world between mid-May and mid-June. We’ve got several news releases that came from Telemanagement World in Nice, amongst plenty of other tidbits that we found newsworthy. Here’s the news for your July issue of Pipeline.

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Change, Convergence & Crossover

Straight up: the blatant message is that today, our industry does not meet customer expectations. However, it is widely recognized that today’s Service Providers (those that are left) finally are now ready to transition from the traditional ways to a more modern ‘lean’ approach to operations. But how, exactly? Operators ask “How do I make this transition from the old to the new?” “What products are certified NGOSS and thereby enable this new lean world?” “What interfaces and API’s do I use to integrate it all?”

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If you were among the thousands who made the trip to Chicago's McCormick Place for NXTcomm 2007, you were no doubt impressed by the glossy and professionally run event. The show, which embodies the reintegration of the USTA and TIA flagship show efforts into a single concentrated event, delivered what many have come to expect – a well-planned and precisely executed, premier telecommunications event. The signage, venue, keynote lightshows, and other production touches were spot-on (though it's a touch surreal to watch a panel of mainstream CTOs walk onto the stage to the Timbaland-produced beats of Justin Timberlake's My Love. Talk about juxtaposition.)

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Service Quality Management (SQM) is the latest in the long list of buzz words floating around the Telecommunication industry as it struggles with competitive pressures and attempts to capture the elusive customer experience. SQM, as a practice, is in its nascent stages as the technology is emerging and practical implementations are months, if not years, away. However, SQM is a natural extension of existing performance management techniques that capture quantitative aspects of the users experience leveraging live and/or synthetic data.

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The triple-play is hot. And no wonder — bundled services are the ultimate win-win. Customers like the price savings and simplicity. Providers like the higher margins, share-of-wallet, and lower churn. Virtually every cable company and traditional telecommunications company now offers a triple-play of voice, data, and either mobility (for the phone companies) or video (for the cable companies). And with Verizon and AT&T rolling out IPTV and the cable companies offering mobility services, n-play has reached the tipping point.

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Web self-service has been an idea that management loves in theory but stumbles over in practice.

What’s not to love? Customers come to your website and not only buy goods and services, but update their account information, check out their bills, participate in self-help forums, and arrange to receive email alerts when new products are announced: all without your having to take the time away from your customer representatives.

What killed off the VCR? Was it the much higher picture quality of the DVD? Well, to some degree, yes. But judging by the common sight of the flashing 12:00 on the vintage VCRs in many homes, the more likely death knell for the videotape players was the extremely cumbersome set-up and function menus that frustrated the average consumer. No wonder the DVD, with its easy point and click, visual menu, won immediate favor with the masses, relegating the VCR to gather dust, used only on rare occasions to view vintage movies or old family videos. And now, with the advent of video on demand, even the DVD is under threat of being surpassed with the convenience of VoD.

“A bargain is anything a customer thinks a store is losing money on.” - Kin Hubbard

It's a matter of perception. The customer wants services, yes. Sharp, clear, reliable services delivered courteously and nonconfrontationally, and he wants those services to not cost any more than is reasonable.