Customer Experience Management (CEM): A must for Telecom operators across the Globe!

By: John Brooks (old)

In a highly competitive and crowded telecom industry, the only key to success and differentiation is a focused customer experience management (CEM) program. With the shift in power from companies to customers becoming more evident, a stronger relationship with existing customers is a must for all telecom operators. Delivering an optimal customer experience can radically bring down churn rates, increase average revenue per user (ARPU) and reduce operational costs. 

Heavy Reading senior analyst Caroline Chappell notes in her Service Provider IT Insider report “Customer Experience Management Still Needs to Bridge the Chasm” (September 2011) that “the ability to capture and understand the events that can affect the customer experience in time to be able to influence and optimize that experience is a major source of differentiation for telcos.” Taking this idea a step further, operators need to be able to accurately predict adverse experiences before they occur and impact the customer. This allows rapid, proactive mitigation to protect and preserve the customer, which will translate to immediate positive impacts on satisfaction and, ultimately, churn. 

Here are the top CEM trends to watch: 

• the importance and meaning of ever increasing customer-history records;
• the need for focused analytics tools to correlate network performance with customer behavior and sentiments;
• the use of end-to-end customer feedback processes across channels;
• the entry of network and IT vendors into the CEM space, making the competition even more intense;
• the increased usage of applications and services on smartphones and tablets, further highlighting the need to understand CEM factors on a daily basis;
• poor network qualities and services contributing to higher churn rates.

CEM, however, is too often still working in silos across telecom companies that fail to bridge the gap between network performance and customer-experience fallouts. CEM programs must start by gathering data from each and every interaction a customer has with the operator, then analyze the same data throughout the entire customer life cycle and, finally, identify when that experience is predicted to become unfavorable. While it is obvious that providing top-class services with few, if any, disruptions goes a long way toward maintaining a positive experience, operators impact experience in many areas, and all must be monitored. The good news of late is that for most of the telcos CEM has moved steadily from the conceptual stage to a more actionable plan, ingrained in daily processes from network operations and marketing to customer-care services. 

According to a survey conducted by Alcatel-Lucent and Heavy Reading, two-thirds of telecom service providers are planning to increase CEM spending by 2013, underscoring the commitment to CEM as strategically important for differentiation.

In the May 2012 issue of Telecom Buzz, published by MobileComm, the article “Customer Experience Management: The Next ‘Buzzword’” declares the four pillars of telecom CEM to be:

• network experience (includes coverage, signal quality, speed);
• commercial experience (includes billing, payment);
• product experience (includes telecom products such as handsets, VAS);
• service experience (includes after-sales service, customer queries).

And key factors that influence operators to develop an effective end-to-end CEM are:

• the rise of social media and sentiment;
• the growing importance of customer insights and CEM analytics;
• churn reduction;
• quality (of service) improvement.

With the increasing usage of social-media platforms, keeping customers happy has become an even higher priority for telecom operators. In the past a slight discomfort with a product or service may have resulted in a complaint and, depending on the outcome, the potential loss of that particular customer. Fast-forward to today: if something goes wrong with a product or service, social media can magnify the complaint, turning a local problem into a global one. Imagine the impact of a new product being delivered poorly and 10 customers complaining openly on Twitter, resulting in 32,000 “retweets” of those complaints to your marketplace.