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The struggle between cablecos and telcos to wrangle the elusive and almighty customer dollar is still in full effect. With neither side even approaching concession, each wields its respective technology in an attempt to maximize service offerings, reduce churn, and increase ARPU. When’s it going to give? What will it take for one technology to win out and be lifted up as the gold standard for connectivity, and be viewed universally as the best option for video, voice, and data, relegating the other to hang out with BetaMax, slide rules, and astrolabes in the land of obsolescence.
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Once upon a time, Telecom was iconoclastic – keeping to itself and inventing everything it needed to perform its mission. Huge labs like Bellcore and Ipswitch Labs advanced human ingenuity. Telecom developed distinct standards and unique tools.
The rise and pervasive reach of the internet and of business-specific media broadcasting is making business and technical information readily available to interested parties in any industry.
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"Customer Service in Telecom"
Government-controlled monopolies, and the people who run them, tend to have an attitude toward customers that differs from that of ordinary corporations. They are, after all, the only game in town, and can craft their policies and procedures to make life easier for the folks behind the scenes. You have an easy job indeed if you don't have to please the customer, and can instead take days to respond to complaints, have inflexible policies, and charge way too much money.
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"New Grounds for Network Optimization"
In the quest for service providers to minimize churn and maximize market share, service quality and customer relations are more important than ever. As rival providers offer an increasing variety of services, traditional market roles and niches are beginning to overlap, producing a trend that clearly increases competitive pressures. Along with this increased competition, subscribers increasingly demand high quality of service and are increasingly willing to switch providers after experiencing service degradation or network down-time.
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"How a Customer-focused Back Office Shapes the User Experience"
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.
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"Q & A with NextNine CEO Adi Dulberg"
Q: What value do remote monitoring and proactive support offer IP Communication service providers that mainstream solutions do not?
A: Unlike mainstream, reactive methodologies, proactive, remote, support automation solutions perform scheduled preventive monitoring and maintenance that avert downtime and prevent problems from impacting service – even before customers identify initial problem symptoms. This approach ensures that resolution is initiated at an earlier stage in the problem cycle, resulting in lower mean time to repair (MTTR) and maximum system availability.
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Many service providers are now starting to think innovatively about how to meet the requirements of users from businesses of all types, large and small.
Irrespective of whether it's fixed or mobile services, business customers have often had to take second place to the consumer market when it came to getting specially targeted offerings from their communications service providers. Sure, the larger national and international companies usually enjoyed dedicated account and support staff and specialist services like Virtual Private Networks, but the experience of many small to medium sized business users has usually been limited to standard service packages.
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“Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.”
-Stanley Marcus
It's amazing how the little things make all the difference. Businesses in general, and telecoms in specific, are often simultaneously beholden to and deaf to the customers that ultimately fund their operations. It is abundantly easy to focus on the bottom line and make as many cuts as the average customer can stomach while still ponying up cash, but that does little to ensure customer loyalty or create new customers. When Stanley Marcus made this well-crafted statement, he was certainly not referring to service offerings in the world of telecommunications. The department store magnate was certainly referring to his industry. Nevertheless, the statement holds true. Customers are people.
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