The Continual Evolution of CEM to the Experience Management Control Continuum

Service providers require a unified data collection, mediation and analytics platform that is capable of collecting the vast amounts of network traffic data, and correlating and enriching it with relevant third-party data streams (like CRM, billing, etc.) to provide the knowledge and wisdom to take the appropriate actions. It all starts with ensuring that the appropriate information about the individual customer interactions is collected. Empirix refers to this approach as W⁴H² –When, Where, What, Why, How and How—as it includes information related the following:

Time:  Space: Application: Communication: Human behavior:

It is the combination of these elements and a powerful analytics engine that gives service providers a unique new solution that provides a real-time view of each individual and valuable customer, in order to distinguish the value of service they perceive on an individual level.

With the Empirix CEA Platform, service providers will finally have a 360-degree view of each individual customer’s end-to-end (E2E) communication and business flows, consolidated into a single interdependent ecosystem.

Leveraging the ability to collect customer experience information for an entire customer base at an individual or group level (enterprise, prepaid, high value, etc.) provides additional benefits, including more efficient customer support and faster problem resolution and opportunities for specific marketing activities.

For customer support, consider that, typically, the vast majority of customer issues have to be resolved by Tier-2 or Tier-3 network engineering and operations teams, and problem resolution may require two or more phone calls with the customer. As the volume of issues increases due to the surge of available data services and growing numbers of actual users, this type of service model becomes unsustainable. Deploying a customer experience analytics solution within the customer care/technical support environment allows Tier-1 staff to troubleshoot basic customer problems, resulting in dramatically fewer customer issues escalated to more expensive Tier-2 and Tier-3 resources. Commonly known as “shifting left” within the service provider space, this practice reduces operating expenses while increasing customer satisfaction by resolving problems faster. In a highly-competitive market, servicing customers more efficiently and cost effectively will allow service providers to boost profitability.

For marketing activities, the information generated in the W⁴H² model will enable marketing and product management teams to deliver the right offer at the right time and place. Having additional information pertaining to W⁴H² can help ensure that only relevant and useful opportunities are presented to individual customers. Understanding customer experience and behaviors will be the key to providing additional revenue streams for the service provider. Take, for example, the ability to provide location- based services: Understanding customer traffic flows on a part of town could be very useful information to a company looking to open a new business. Service providers can leverage anonymized data to create new revenue streams and work with local businesses to provide targeted offers.

The key message for service providers is this: if you want to remain competitive, now is the time to transition from your existing customer experience solutions to a more highly-evolved Experience Management Control Continuum (EMCC) that will provide your organization with the ability to understand and anticipate your customers’ needs. This will, in turn, enable increased operational efficiencies, improve customer satisfaction, and expose additional revenue streams.