Pipeline Publishing, Volume 5, Issue 7

	This Month's Issue:
	Product Lifecycle Management

Keeping the Customer Satisfied
Why Customer Experience is the Critical Differentiator in New Generation Telecoms

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co-ordinate physical and electronic provisioning - all of this means that just as excellent customer service is becoming a vital market differentiator, it is becoming harder to provide. The problem may not be at the CRM level, but in how we handle the data and processes on which the customer experience really depends.

Managing the Critical Interactions

When the customer thinks about service, he or she is normally thinking about points of contact with the organization, and about two key points of contact in particular:

Initial provisioning when the selected products are provided - Are the correct products supplied? Are they configured as specified? Was the delivery timely? Does the product work first time, and is support for initial use comprehensive?
Ongoing customer service - If the customer has a problem, a fault to report or a query, how is the response perceived then? Is it quick? Does the CSR understand the problem? Can it be resolved first time? If it can't be resolved first time, how long does it take to apply the necessary expertise and get the problem solved?

Eliminating Friction: Why the Customer Experience Matters

The customer experience matters because it is at these points of contact that the customer forms a perception of the company. When the service is being delivered well, the customer is likely to think about the service provider very little – in fact, he or she is as likely to attribute satisfaction with the service to the handset or to other customer equipment. When it goes badly, or an issue arises, it's ALL about the service provider.

The point of customer service is the source of potential friction and, particularly where other factors are either invisible or discounted, the amount of heat which is generated plays an arguably disproportionate but nonetheless very real part in how the service provider is perceived.

Managing Diversification and Complexity

Difficulty in delivering a quality customer experience can be attributed in large part to the diversification strategy that many service providers have followed in recent years, and in particular:

Portfolio expansion – where a very short time ago most service providers were associated with one vertically integrated primary service, whether that was fixed line POTS, mobile or internet service, now, virtually every service provider in the developed world is offering some kind of multi-play proposition, is at least partly dependent on partners, and is seeking to open further revenue streams.

The customer experience matters because it is at these points of contact that the customer forms a perception of the company.

Portfolio complexity – the greater the number of services on offer, the greater the number of ways of combining them into various packages and bundles, and the greater the need for product marketing to do so, whether to seize the initiative or to respond to a competitor move.

Taking a Rational Approach

Many of the challenges inherent in the new and more complex service ecosystem with which CSPs have to work can be addressed through better management and understanding of the underlying data and processes that support the customer interaction. In particular, we need to:

Rationalize information and eliminate manual duplication across systems. In any data processing environment, this is shown to reduce not only effort, but the errors which arise from duplication and replication. So, for example, a handset and its capabilities should only be defined in one place, notwithstanding that it may be sold standalone to a consumer or bundled with WiFi and a laptop card for a corporate package. That handset can be treated as a component, reusable across many packages and bundles. The same principle can be applied to services and to the less tangible components of service delivery, such as activation commands or workflow steps. By rationalizing information into commonly reusable components, we eliminate the errors that arise from duplication, and where errors fall in number, the quality of service inevitably rises.
Rationalize service fulfilment processes: why do we need to replicate, for example, common fulfilment activities across multiple service types? A consumer credit check is a consumer credit check; a delivery booking is a delivery booking, whether it's to install a Home Media Centre or a DSL router. If we continue to duplicate common processes across an ever increasing stack of products and services, the business of service provision soon becomes unsupportable. Further, those processes, though identical on paper, will tend to diversify within their silos, removing any hope of consistency from the fulfilment process. And even where faults and flaws are identified, the sheer amount of work and co-ordination across so many stacks will make it impossible to introduce service improvement.

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