By: Jesse Cryderman

Pop quiz: What is the most commonly used acronym in telecommunications these days? Although I secretly wish it were POTS, short for “plain old telephone service,” the answer is CEM, or customer experience management. The level of attention and investment that communications service providers (CSPs) and their vendors are giving to CEM is staggering: in survey after survey it’s become clear that the buzz surrounding CEM is much more than lip service, so much so that Oracle has designated the present day as the “customer experience era.”

Dig past the marketing rhetoric and it’s clear that the technological gap between competing CSPs is narrowing. “As price and performance across providers converge, the account service and support, in many instances, becomes the differentiator,” said Frank Perazzini, director of telecommunications at J.D. Power and Associates. CSPs are starting to view CEM as a vital tool that can help them stand out from the crowd, acquire new subscribers, increase the “stickiness” of their services (i.e., reduce churn and improve loyalty), and accelerate growth.

When the industry talks about CEM it seems like most discussion defaults to the consumer segment, but equally, if not more, important is the business-customer segment, which brings a unique set of needs and expectations of its own to the table. Contracts with large enterprises and small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) deliver much greater margins than any in the consumer segment, but competition is fierce for business customers, which are more likely to churn than one might expect. Indeed, “CSPs see that SMBs are one of the fastest-growing segments,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing for Amdocs, at a recent press junket in New York for the company’s new product suite of customer experience systems, CES 9.

Have you fine-tuned your CEM strategy for the enterprise and SMB segments? The following are six ways to ensure that your services are optimized and attractive to business customers, and offer the types of experiences that will earn their loyalty.

1. Customize, customize, customize.

To truly address the needs of their business customers, CSPs must be capable of customizing a unique service package for each one. This is customization with a capital C, and it’s the first important step in the business-customer life cycle, not just simple tweaks to a static product catalog; a dynamic catalog with suggestive offerings and real-time upgrade and bundling incentives is essential. Enterprise customers want their service packages to offer stability, plus flexibility and scalability in order to avoid exorbitant overages, while enabling and supporting future growth. SMBs might not currently have the IT expertise on hand to select the best package from, say, six bucket options in a static catalog, but customization and support during the ordering process, either automated-slash-virtual or live, are key.

Furthermore, as the range of virtualized IT services widens, CSPs must convince their business customers that they are trusted providers of more than just voice and data. In 2009 Ernst & Young examined the unique challenges of the enterprise space and highlighted customization as an important strategy in its report: “If telcos want to win customers over they would be better served by showing a greater understanding of individual business requirements and tailoring their service propositions accordingly, rather than promoting a wide range of services that enterprises don’t need or want.”

Windstream, which acquired Paetec in 2011, has built a successful operation creating “personalized solutions” for business customers. In numerous case studies the benefit of Windstream’s dedication to customization is apparent: treating each customer as an individual entity, not a collection of SKUs (stock-keeping units), goes an incredibly long way toward establishing enduring loyalty.