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By Dan Blacharski
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.
There was a time, in the old days of telecom monopoly, when long distance calls were expensive, call quality was poor, and connections were difficult to make. If you wanted service, you were put on a waiting list. When you wanted a phone, the phone company rented you one. There was only one style and color. Today's amazing wealth of products and services, and remarkably low prices, is due first to competition, and second, to the need for competitors to put the customer first in order to get a share of the market. For the first time, the phone company had to start thinking, "maybe our customers would like the option of having a pink phone, or a white one. And maybe we shouldn't make 'em stand in line for so long."
The Telecom Dilemma
The fundamental dilemma faced by telcos is that they must provide more services, at higher levels of quality, while constantly lowering prices. "In this ever-increasing competitive telecom market, differentiation through state-of-the-art customer and value-added services is becoming increasingly important, " said Stephanie Atkinson, Managing Partner and Principal Analyst from Compass Intelligence. "This being said, Operational Support Systems must cater to consumer and business customer needs through creative phone, web/on-line, call center, and personal communications that integrate seamlessly with OSSes. In fact, in an increasingly commoditized market, customer services/value-added services are expected to be crucial decision-making factors when choosing a telecom/IT provider over the next two to three years."
In a monopoly situation, you can grow your market just by sitting around and waiting for it to happen, and you can increase revenue just by arbitrarily raising your prices. But that doesn't work in telecom anymore. Today, you have to accumulate market share by taking it away from the other guy. There are three ways to do this: (1) keep existing customers (reduce churn), (2) offer them new services (increase ARPU), and (3) deliver superior customer service.
Delivering that service isn't as easy as it sounds for telcos, and while it starts with a certain philosophy and mindset, from there, it gets technical. It can be accomplished by first implementing a thorough platform for customer self-service, by implementing convergence in your OSS systems where multiple silos of information and functionality are unified and are able to communicate with one another, and by moving to a more competitive "lean" mode of operation.
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"In a monopoly situation, you can grow your market just by sitting around and waiting for it to happen..." |
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Customer Self-Service
Regardless of your industry, including a self-service option is an absolute must. It keeps costs down, and most customers find that it is much more convenient. That's why banks have more ATM machines and fewer tellers, why supermarkets now have self-service checkout lanes, and why right-thinking telcos have self-service web sites where customers can buy service, troubleshoot problems, and pay their bills without having to talk to a human. Unless they need to. And that's the key phrase there--having the option to talk to a human is a key component of self-service. True enough, the majority of situations are predictable and can be handled without human intervention, but no matter how much you plan, there will always be a situation that is unique. A live agent has to be available to intervene.
Patricia Seybold Group published a series of customer self-service "test drives" to explore how customer self-service works. In their report, "Customer Self-Service at Verizon," analyst Mitchell Kramer takes a detailed look at how Verizon approaches self-service. The report shows that Verizon has approached this in the right way, noting that Verizon "exceeds requirements for customer self-service in the areas of lifecycle support, especially to diagnose problems and to access and update customer information, UI content management, escalation, and architecture."
Kramer notes that "accessing and updating customer information is another of the most critical customer self-service activities.” His report found that Verizon supports this well, and the company's web site has taken the concept of integration to heart. "Once you log in, verizon.com connects your account to customer identification and preference information, to installed product and services information, to billing information, to order information, to incident information. The site creates a comprehensive, single customer view, making it easy for you to do business with Verizon."
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