By: Becky Bracken

Building customer loyalty requires a several-pronged approach and happens from the network level up to customer service. Here are the building blocks of customer loyalty and how operators and service providers can leverage each to reduce churn and build a lasting customer relationship.

It's time to focus on building customer loyalty. It's the singularly most powerful tool for service providers and operators to compete with over-the-top (OTT) players. First, the no-brainer bit. The service has to work ALL the time. Outages and poor service quality should be reserved for those customers you could really take or leave. The customers you want to keep need reliable service that works. But beyond nuts-and-bolts reliable connectivity, new suped-up services like 4G LTE mobile network speeds can go a long way to making your customer's casual dalliance a lasting commitment.

According to Ovum CEM research released in Nov. 2013, CEM is the leading driver of telco investment in 2014. 

“After many years of cost reduction, senior telco IT executives clearly see the need to invest again in CRM projects that will support overall customer experience,” says Shagun Bali, analyst at Ovum. “Over the next 12 months, consolidating and developing integrated multichannel CRM systems and business processes will be top of the priority list for operators. However, to succeed, networks need to be smarter,” she continued.

Bali believes that CEM really comes down to vision rather than a technology. Getting all of the silos housed within the CSP motivated to forfeit ownership of their own sets of data is going to take some effort, according to Bali. Without the necessary effort, the customer experience will continue to suffer through long hold times, reactive, rather than proactive customer care and ill-informed customer service personnel.

Real-time, first-time issue resolution matters 

Customers want things when they want them and that's the very approach smart CSPs must adopt when measuring customer experience.

According to the 2014 J.D. Power report on wireless customer satisfaction, wireless providers are getting worse, not better at handling customer inquiries.  

"It's imperative that wireless service carriers improve their ability to resolve customer issues in one contact and reduce the number of service channels customers need to visit to address their problem," said Kirk Parsons, Senior Director of telecommunications at J.D. Power. "Keeping the service call to five minutes or less may reduce overall call volume to the carrier, thereby improving customer satisfaction and loyalty."

In fact, J.D. Power finds that the rate that customers have to contact their providers more than once to resolve an issue has risen to 23 percent from 17 percent in 2011, a 6-point jump in just two years. And among customers who resolve their issue during a single phone call, satisfaction is 846 (on a 1,000-point scale) and declines to 662 when problem resolution takes two or more calls.

And customer satisfaction has shown to directly impact the bottom line. Amdocs research shows a direct correlation between Net Promoter Score (NPS) and the amount a customer is likely to spend with a CSP, according to Head of Product and Partner Marketing, Customer Management for Amdocs Yossi Zohar. This is prompting many mobile service providers to pursue increasingly precise customer experience measurement solutions.