2. Provide a SPOC.

According to the latest J.D. Power and Associates Business Data Satisfaction Study, customer service is a primary point of concern for business customers. Consider these findings:

• Twenty-six percent of large enterprises and 17 percent of SMBs chose their data provider because of its reputation for good customer service.
• An SPOC, or single point of contact, increases customer-service satisfaction; it may also help reduce business-customer churn and build loyalty.
• Overall satisfaction among businesses that use a provider’s SPOC is 68 index points higher (on a 1,000-point scale) than among those that don’t.
• Only 16 percent of businesses that use an SPOC indicated they’re likely to switch providers in the next 12 months, compared to 20 percent that don’t.

Converging customer service for the business segment into an SPOC is crucial for CSPs. Optimum Business, which ranked highest among providers catering to “the very small business segment” in J.D. Power’s study, has implemented an SPOC called Account Center.

“The Account Center simplifies the Optimum Business customer experience and enables management of all services in one place for a better and more streamlined experience,” said Joseph Varello, vice president of business and voice product management for Cablevision, the company’s corporate owner. “Whether a customer uses basic email, voice products or more complex services such as Optimum Voice SIP Trunking, it is now easier to explore and control account and product features.”

3. Be proactive and preemptive in your problem solving.

Preventing and resolving service interruptions in the consumer segment is certainly important, but in the business segment it’s absolutely vital. When Amazon’s cloud services went down for 49 minutes on January 31, $4 million in potential sales evaporated. Outages, which in many instances can be prevented, cost businesses billions of dollars every year.

Business customers expect a customized, converged service package with an SPOC for support, and they demand superior service quality and rapid issue resolution. Comarch recently polled small-to-medium enterprises in Europe and reported that “the biggest cause of frustration amongst SMEs is service providers’ inability to resolve problems quickly and effectively.”

As everyone knows, the best time to fix a problem is before it occurs. CSPs must be both proactive and preemptive when it comes to their high-value business customers, and pervasive, real-time network analysis is a valuable tool to this end. Solutions from vendors like Acme Packet (recently acquired by Oracle), Qosmos and NetScout offer deep insight into complex networks, identifying and straightening out problems long before they have the chance to become headaches. They also allow service providers to test out new networks before they go live, thus unveiling potential pain points.

4. Offer an MDM platform.

Another popular acronym these days is BYOD, which stands for “bring your own device” and refers to the trend of employees using their own smartphones and tablets on their employers’ networks. Mobile device management, or MDM — managing and securing countless user devices that run on multiple operating systems — is a challenging task, and as a result, business customers are looking for solutions that can help them address their needs as they increasingly become mobile organizations.

“Mobile enterprise management, particularly MDM, is poised for significant growth over the next few years, with mobile devices, whether personal or business, becoming ubiquitous in the business environment,” said Stephen Drake, IDC’s program vice president of mobile enterprise.

T-Mobile recently deployed an MDM solution for its business customers called MobileIron. “As business mobilizes, organizations often must support multiple operating systems, secure enterprise data on both corporate- and employee-owned devices, and build and deliver mobile applications,” said Frank Sickinger, the company’s senior vice president of B2B. “However, many of these organizations are at a crossroads on how to address security and device management efficiently and cost-effectively.”

Whether in-house or through partnerships, CSPs should develop their mobile enterprise offerings with an eye toward enabling their business customers to “mobilize” their operations.