Who Knows SMAC? Integrating Social, Mobile, Analytics and the Cloud
Mobility: Customer behavior is changing; they want a digital, mobile lifestyle, which means providing bundled services across many devices, along with a digital content landscape that should ideally offer virtually unlimited choice. And as smart devices have become more ubiquitous, consumer behavior has translated this desire for a mobile digital ecosystem to the corporate environment, and enterprise customers are now asking that their employees have access to company information anytime, anywhere.
As the expectations of the two environments are now rapidly converging, enterprise customers are increasingly acting like consumers and demanding mobility offerings that will increase productivity, enhance efficiency and provide substantial cost savings. Key examples of these demands include employees asking to bring their own device (BYOD) or choose their own device (CYOD) in the workplace. Due to this shift on the part of consumers, which is spilling into the office environment, enterprises have no choice but to meet these demands. However, supporting various platforms (i.e., Apple and Android) is not easy, and their service providers currently lack the expertise to assist, making the task even more daunting.
Advanced Analytics Driven: Any next-generation customer engagement solution must be based on advanced analytics to help operators meet customers’ needs in real time. Advanced analytics help deliver contextual insight for operators by navigating through copious amounts of data and looking at disparate incoming data sources such as customer care, product/service/device portfolios, cost and billing and network service quality to segment customers. This allows for more targeted up- and cross-sell opportunities and also helps operators predict future behavior patterns.
In the context of customer care, operators have many options to consider. First, they will need to create a robust repository of error fixes, enable proactive resolution of issues by guiding contact center agents to reduce average handle time and receive continuous contextual intelligence updates that effectively maintain an up-to-date map of each customer. This should include a probabilistic engine, which predicts trends and the likelihood that customers will act – e.g., call, return device, churn, time of bill pay, etc. These must be done on a per-subscriber/per-service basis where correlations and patterns affecting individual customers can be brought to light.
Cloud: Although speed to market can help companies gain a competitive advantage, it often requires a major overhaul of existing deployment tools and network reengineering to shorten the deployment and delivery cycle. Cloud-based services can significantly reduce the time required for service deployment, allowing companies to scale their applications or deploy multiple servers within minutes by simply clicking a few buttons.
Service providers are also looking to a more aggressive cloud strategy to meet the market demands of business customers who are looking for solutions that provide efficient business operations (disaster recovery, web sites, workforce automation, business process automation), deliver greater employee mobility and productivity (videoconferencing, UC, document and knowledge sharing etc.) and fill skills gaps (such as IT support). Today, the context of the enterprise customer’s concept of a hybrid cloud is becoming mainstream.
In a hybrid cloud environment, some resources are managed and provisioned in-house or in hosted private cloud environments, while others are delivered by public cloud services. This could be Web 2.0 or business-critical applications hosted and supplied by the service provider, for example, which integrate with customer data that is kept internally within the customer’s own data center.
