Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 5 - Mark Nicholson, CTO Mark Nicholson, Syndesis CTO and Adam Boone, Syndesis, VP, Global Marketing

Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Impacting the Customer Experience

Subscriber-centric Fulfillment:
How a Customer-focused Back Office
Shapes the User Experience

By Mark Nicholson and Adam Boone

On any given day, we are bombarded with dozens of offers to change or upgrade our communications services. These invitations slide through the letter box, slick and glossy, amid bills and real estate ads. They flash at us from the sides of our browser and the side of the road. They reach us in email and voice mail, text message and news print, on radio and TV. They even get to us – albeit indirectly – on community list serves, where tech savvy neighbors rate broadband voice quality, trade insights on mobile coverage, and weigh the latest fiber versus cable bundles.

Today’s increasingly crowded communications market has brought subscribers more choice than ever before. But this intense competition – among new entrants and old – has upped the ante for telecom operators. It’s driving service providers to focus greater attention on customer acquisition, satisfaction, and retention and to commit to “building long-term partnerships with customers,” “exceeding customer expectations,” and “taking the customer experience to the next level.”

But what does that “next level” mean for telecom operators? Put overly simply, it means turning on a dime. To remain competitive and secure customer loyalty, providers today need to meet subscribers’ rapidly changing requirements while capitalizing on their “buyer’s impulse.” This means bringing new service offerings to market faster than ever before – offerings that can be personalized, self-managed, and delivered on-demand, any where, any time, and ultimately via any device. It means providing value, quality, and variety. It means being responsive and effective with each customer interaction.

But in a world of content-based offerings and many-service customers, such a “next level” customer experience extends well beyond the domain of traditional front office touch points – long the primary focal point for managing the subscriber relationship. By extending the customer focus of CRM into the back office, and even down to the network, service providers are better able to meet the ongoing customer commitment required of dynamic new services in a highly competitive market.

Serving the “Market of One”

Before examining the critical role the back office – and, specifically, subscriber-centric fulfillment – plays in converting customer experience into customer loyalty, we first need to consider recent trends in the industry.

An increasingly common concept across all types of businesses is the “market of one.” This concept calls for a product or service business to invest in tools and processes that enable it to achieve mass production efficiencies, while at the same time permitting each consumer to customize the product or service to meet their individual needs. Examples abound in the automotive industry, where a consumer can visit a web site, choose a base model of an auto, select from a host of options, then place an order or locate a matching vehicle with a local dealer. While much of the product is standardized, the consumer’s power to select attributes according to personal preference creates the potential for higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The concept is related to that of “The Long Tail,” an increasingly ubiquitous term coined by Wired Magazine Editor Chris Anderson. The Long Tail refers to the long, drawn out part of the demand curve for any given type

"But what does that “next level” mean for telecom operators? Put overly simply, it means turning on a dime."

of product or service, indicating that an underserved market exists for relatively specialized offerings that do not achieve mass market appeal. With the right IT tools and sales fulfillment processes, for example, a firm could make a profit selling recordings of amazingly obscure artists even if the demand for each individual title was very low.

Both of these concepts have increasing relevance to the telecommunications industry. As consumer choice increases, service providers are experiencing extreme downward pricing pressure on traditional connectivity-based services, such as classic telephony and data services. The inevitable result is that a service provider must either choose to optimize around connectivity services and strive to become the low-cost leader, or else it must seek to offer ever-more innovative offerings and differentiate to command a price premium and higher margins.

This latter strategy actually can be a key driver of change as service providers continue their steady march toward extensive transformational initiatives around both network and operations. The service providers who can rapidly bring new, innovative services to market can capture a greater share of customer wallet, enabling higher margins that can actually fuel transformation initiatives.

Furthermore, the service providers who capture the largest share of customer wallet will be those that can establish a foundation of service offerings that can be rapidly and simply tailored to meet individual customer needs, to serve the “markets of one.” This calls for customer self-service capabilities and the ability to easily extend and expand service offerings to incorporate new features as they become available.

This issue becomes especially important as the definition of a “service” evolves to encompass both connectivity and applications. For example, a subscriber may receive telephony, IPTV, Internet service and other applications over a single instance of connectivity. All of these applications and the connectivity must be coordinated and managed in tandem, especially if new, bandwidth-hungry applications are added, to manage bandwidth contention.

For these capabilities to be realized, a reinvention of the fulfillment processes is necessary, with the new approach to fulfillment aligned around an awareness of the individual subscriber.

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