Free
Subscription
sign up here

The 2009 JD Power rankings betray an interesting situation.  The results of their customer satisfaction surveys for the US market are divided into four regional categories (South, North Central, East, West).  Under the category of telephone service providers, the top spots in every region go to cable operators.  Cox in the East and the West.  Bright House in the South.  WOW! (Wide Open West) in the North Central.

» read complete article

Every month, Pipeline endeavors to bring you the latest news from the OSS/BSS, and wider communications space with the intent of highlighting some of the stories you may have missed, and perhaps contextualizing a few of the stories you didn’t.  For more news in the space, visit our News Center here.

Huawei has reported that Matt Bross has landed. Since the announcements of his departure from BT in late June, many in the industry have been speculating ...

» read complete article

I hit the Yankee Group’s 4G World event in my hometown of Chicago a few weeks back. It left me thinking that our industry is out of touch with where users are driving the market. We’re still trying to convince ourselves that customers will keep paying increasing subscription and per-use rates for a superior service experience. We want to believe that top line revenue will explode if we just stop offering unlimited service packages in favor of far more complex pricing and charging scenarios. Categorically, I just don’t buy it.

» read complete article

“In the Beginning…”

Some history for our younger readers: once upon a time, the information systems used by all businesses, including phone companies, were card indexes. That’s right, made from trees. Then smart people began to seize the idea that those new-fangled computers might help us organize our data and run our businesses more effectively. With no commercial products out there to buy to do the job, we built our own.

Introduction

There’s a profound transformation underway in the telecommunications landscape.  A new wave of “smart” devices – iPhones, BlackBerries, Android (Google) phones and netbooks – is redefining how people communicate.  Compelling new applications like Facebook, YouTube and Flickr are redefining the meaning of service and injecting new players into the competitive mix. In this evolving telecom environment,..

» read complete article

The telecommunications industry’s emphasis on customer experience derives from two sources. First, it is viewed by many as a necessary re-focusing of service assurance onto the customer: failures in the network are relevant to the extent that they impact customers, and a view through this lens places a CSP’s priorities in the right place.

Second, the term “customer experience” derives from usage outside of telecom, where it means...

» read complete article

In today’s competitive economy, customer retention is a high priority for service providers looking for new ways of not only sustaining revenue, but for generating new opportunities as well.  Unfortunately this critical audience – your key “bread and butter” base, on whom you’ve already spent valuable marketing dollars convincing, and winning, their business – is constantly being courted by competitors looking to expand their marketshare.

Policy control has started to evolve from an enforcement solution to find its way into the center of the customer experience.  Mobile operators have spotted the potential for policy control to improve the customer experience in an automated, yet intelligent way.  The potential was always there, as policy control has infinite possibilities to make anything happen on the network, based on virtually any event or stimulus.

Service providers know that managing the end-user experience is critical to reducing subscriber churn and the associated costs of capturing new customers. But offering a high quality customer experience today is no easy task. With an ever increasing array of new services, customers have varying degrees of quality expectations.

For example, a residential customer may want a fast Internet connection when downloading a YouTube movie, but five seconds give or take won’t make...

“There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else” 

I’ll admit it.  I’m not a very patient subscriber.  Maybe it’s a by-product of a working-class upbringing, but while I’m not shy about spending money for services I want, I’m discerning about those expenses and count on the fact that my providers will do what they say...