"Service providers' plans don't match the way that customers use their products," says Chris Gunner, VP and CTO of Active Broadband Networks, which provides subscriber data management, traffic management, and other types of customer experience analysis. "However, in order to evaluate the extent to which this is or isn't the case, service providers need to be able to easily evaluate information about what their customers are doing."
New analytics solutions are helping to make this a reality, both in the types of data they examine and the way in which they present the data. Solution vendors like Aito and Connectiva, among others, are crafting beautiful and useful GUIs that create a clear (literal) image of user patterns, and also have drill-down capability that allows a granular view of usage patterns. What's more, the GUIs mean that you don't need to be an engineer to make sense of the data, so departments across the entire organization can clearly and easily monitor usage. Heck, some of these monitoring dashboards even have fairly slick iPad apps.
Clear Results
Over the past few years, I've had frequent conversations about the customer-centric movement, both here in the Pipeline office and with vendors, service providers, and analysts in the space. One big question mark for many of the products under the "customer experience" umbrella is return on investment. Clearly there are benefits to an improved customer relationship, but is an improved customer relationship everything? It's difficult to quantify many of the results of these efforts, because it's hard to prove the counter-factual. That is, you can count how many customers churned, but it's harder to know how many customers didn't churn.
Nevertheless, case studies have emerged that paint a clear picture of the benefits of customer analytics.
Take the case of XL Axiata, a major wireless provider in Indonesia, who deployed a customer analytics solution from Anritsu, in partnership with Aito, in October of last year. The provider reports a nearly-instantaneous uptick in first call resolution (an immediate 2 percent improvement), case resolution and SLA adherence (a nearly immediate and sustained 5 percent improvement), and overall customer satisfaction (a similar 5 percent bump).
Finnish B2B provider TDC Oy Finland, likewise, publicly reports improved profitability, decreased churn, and improved efficiency after instituting an analytics solution from Aito.
Furthermore, in a case study by customer experience analytics vendor ClickFox, Lance Williams, director of Customer Management with Sprint Nextel, speaks about that service provider's foray into customer analytics, and gives massive credit to increased customer insight. Williams happily reports delighted customers and an overall improved level of customer satisfaction, but he also makes a claim that is more compelling: massive cost savings. Williams states that Sprint Nextel, as a matter of public record, has a call center budget that is half of what it was in 2008. What's more, back in 2008, the ACSI (American Customer Satisfaction Institute) ranked Sprint last among U.S. carriers in customer satisfaction. Now, despite a trimmer budget, Sprint has catapulted to first place.
