Watchdogs across the globe ask customers to use public methods for communicating their bad experiences so they can be shared with others. Considering that the current telecom market is growing at an ultra-competitive pace, this has forced operators to develop two paths for CEM: first, an end-to-end customer-experience strategy to provide customers with a hassle-free experience throughout their lifetimes, and second, a team within the company that’s dedicated to capturing and managing discontent generated via social media.

The growing importance of customer insights and CEM analytics

 “Customer Experience Management (CEM) Market & Voice of Customer (VoC) Analytics Market — Worldwide Market Size and Forecasts (2012-2017),” a recent market-research report published by MarketsandMarkets, says the total CEM and VoC analytics market is expected to reach $6.61 billion by 2017, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 19.8 percent.

Customer insights, if properly synced with internal processes, can create a huge impact on collaborating silo departments within telcos, helping deliver great customer experience and improved business performance. With the trend shifting more towards social-media analytics and behavioral analytics, operators are considering these technologies an integral part of their CEM solutions. 

A crucial step towards improving the customer experience is understanding everything there is to know about customers, and using this knowledge to treat customers in a unique way. This calls for an extensive application of analytics to pull data from disparate sources in order to deliver a comprehensive CEM solution. Using advanced techniques to analyze data collected from customer touch points and quality-of-service metrics, patterns can be detected that predict churns. 

Churn reduction

A major challenge for telcos is to reduce churns. The most important (and often controllable) reason for losing a customer is bad customer experience, and a key driver for reducing churn is defined by the ability to understand what level of service quality a customer is actually experiencing while having interaction at various touch points. Strategies for reducing churn need to take place at every step of the customer life cycle. If marketing communicates something that is not supported by product quality, network infrastructure, billing processes, or customer care/service teams, the relationship worsens until, ultimately, the customer moves away.

However, an improved customer experience can be achieved by delivering a unique service quality recognized in every stage of the customer life cycle. This can be best achieved by integrating and proactively engaging the major functions: marketing, sales, customer care, and, most importantly, network.