Letter from the Editor

By: Tim Young - do not use (default)

“It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages.” —Henry Ford

Henry Ford was a lot of things, but first and foremost he was a man who understood who buttered his bread. The innovative steps he took, from new assembly-line methods to the then-unheard-of $5-a-day wage the Ford Motor Company paid its employees in 1914, were implemented in the name of building a high-quality product for the sake of creating happy customers.

It’s the essence of most any business: maximizing customer satisfaction. Of course, when the product is a service, superior customer experience isn’t created through tangible material quality alone but through thousands of tiny touches. It’s the particular pitch and hum of a dial tone and the attitude of a customer-service rep. It’s the number of seconds — or, one hopes, fractions of seconds — that elapse as a connection is established. It’s the weight of a handset or the personal hygiene of an installation technician.

Some of these things can be controlled easily, and some are more elusive. All of them, however, are easier to get a handle on if you have a thorough awareness of what the customer is doing and a clear plan for improving as much of the customer experience as is reasonable.

The good news is that we as an industry have gotten much better at it — we have more tools and are learning how to better use them. The bad news is that we still have far to go, facing complex technical and practical barriers that must be demolished in order to enhance a customer experience that’s impacted by and cobbled together from a variety of different pieces, many of which are beyond our control.

It is that elaborate puzzle that we address in this month’s issue of Pipeline, which focuses on enriching the customer experience. We hear from industry leaders like Oracle, NSN and Amdocs on how the intricacies of customer experience management (CEM) can be overcome by embracing those intricacies. We discuss the glut of customer analytics data that’s out there and examine how to make the most of it. We talk about the specific challenges of CEM for mobile broadband and how location-based services can be best leveraged to improve the customer experience. We hear from Acme Packet on how CEM can be addressed in the inscrutable world of all-IP networks, and we discuss ways to increase customer loyalty on the enterprise side.

As always, if there’s anything we can do to provide our readers — our customers — with better service, do let us know. You can contact me at editor@pipelinepub.com anytime.

Enjoy,

Tim Young
Editor-in-Chief