 Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 7 |
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This
Month's Issue: |
On The Horizon |
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Why Customers Churn:
Realities about Experience, Blended Services,
and Globalization |
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in a drawer and go for the next available offer as soon as the freebies are exhausted.
Finally, Skype was also down for two or three days a while back, which lead to some unhappy subscribers, but Skype is part of the social network fabric and was able to use this to its advantage when communicating the outage and its resolution. Skype’s organizational structure allowed the support team to cut across support boundaries to quickly identify the trouble and fix it by working directly with the faulty provider. Additionally, Skype has set the appropriate customer expectation by the very nature of the product they sell. Customers understand the services and have the appropriate expectations of what they have purchased and are subsequently more tolerant.
These are a couple of examples among millions defining the customer experience. It is this confusion that makes it very difficult to create a successful strategy for reducing customer churn.
Thinking about customer experience in absolute terms and enterprise wide solutions |
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New customers sign up quickly because they want to fit a new TV in their house and take advantage of the free minutes but then they will put their SIM card in a drawer and go for the next available offer as soon as the freebies are exhausted. |
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- Automatically compensating the failure to deliver a service with attractive alternatives
- Polishing sales skills to listen to customer demand
- Understanding the perception about operator’s strengths and role in the mixture of cultures specific to a certain geographical area
- Training customer support on the meaning and realities of a new service, opening communication channels and building service-oriented support for surfacing incident cause and solution in a humanly readable and understandable way at customer interface level
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is a recipe for failure and still so many executives appointed to fix it do just this by:
- Spending time on defining the meaning of “carrier-grade” for the quality of a TV channel or the speed of downloading a web-page
- Testing and analyzing OSS tools for service management
- Rushing to roll out new technologies
- Fighting to preserve the brand
- Segmenting customers based upon churn propensity or market segment
- Adhoc or stop gap strategies to address churn
The reality is that customers churn because we all live in an age where service is delivered on a transactional base rather than a subscription base so whether we are on-line at home or on the go anywhere in the world, we have many other comparable choices at any time and these choices are constantly broadening. Additionally, the upcoming generations are more accustomed to change so churn will become even greater over time.
Stubbornly following the traditions of delivering voice service results in capex and opex will only enrich incumbent NEPs and SIs without delivering on the promised customer experience!
There are ways to pre-empt customer churn by: |
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Creating a customer culture within the organization where everyone is empowered to deliver the correct level of customer services based upon customer expectation
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Matching the level of service demanded by the customer and not using one size fits all customer methodology for services provided
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Continuously feeding the long tail of services that protects against starvation in customer appetite for service and creates new niches
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Partner with Internet darlings rather than fight them in courts while protecting and securely sharing mutual customer identities for seamless service across domains
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Developing new partnering strategies that will enable lower cost of service delivery
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Exposing non-core components to 3rd party providers to build additional services from which both parties can benefit
Being a successful provider in the Telco 2.0 era means assuring profitable revenue from services while coping with, rather than eliminating, customer churn.
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