Verizon also has an active presence on social media, and a page on Facebook just for small business customers. Here, as well as through other channels, Verizon provides a wealth of supportive information for the small business customer, such as strategies to optimize office technology, webinars to help boost leads, and case studies. Alongside this beneficial knowledge base is a loyalty program called Verizon Small Biz Rewards (which is very popular among small business), and various bundling incentives. These efforts have paid off for Verizon’s small business unit. JD Power recently recognized Verizon as the leading provider for small and medium sized business in the U.S.

Incorporating subscriber view

Measuring quality of experience from the end-user perspective has become a key strategy in the CEM arsenal for many service providers. There are a couple of reasons for this. First, if there are capacity or congestion constraints, it is crucial that high-value, VIP customers continue to receive the top Quality of Experience (QoE). It’s not enough to know that a single macro site is congested. What are the business effects of that congestion? Without insight into the subscriber view, it’s very difficult to ascertain the answer to that question. Secondly, customer care can be significantly accelerated or even automated with a view down to the device.

There are generally two methods to determining what service looks like on the customer end, and what can be done about it. The first is an on-device application that runs in the background, and the second is through a combination of non-GPS based geolocation and advanced algorithms. Telefónica Argentina, for example, uses Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive solution to streamline self- and agent-assisted care.

“Our customers not only want their devices to bring them new experiences, but they want them to deliver it in a way that is also easy and relatively transparent,” said Jose Luis Caresani, head of broadband services, Telefónica Argentina. “Using Customer Experience tools from Motive allows us to do just that remotely, sometimes without the customer even being aware.”

Vodafone Qatar recently tapped Ciqual for on-device visibility, which the company is using to not only better serve the customer, but to better understand its network and plan for future upgrades.

"Through Ciqual’s unique device-based CEM solution, we will have the ability to get real-time feedback of all major network parameters across Qatar,” said Marc Norris, CCO, Vodafone Qatar. “We will use this granular information to better design upgrades of our network and, in the future, to start managing individual experience of customers who wish to enjoy this service.”

There are some issues with on-device applications, however. In general, these apps are opt-in, and in general, not enough subscribers opt-in for privacy reasons. Second, these apps are often battery hogs, and battery life is everything to the modern say smartphone user. An alternative solution is to use geo-analysis to identify customers. InfoVista recently released such a product, called VistaNEO. Using geo-analysis, operators can correlate the business impact of network performance on a per-subscriber level, said Bernard Bretton, CMO, InfoVista.

Capturing the voice of the customer

Service providers must have a system in place to capture their customers’ voices in order to better align services to customer needs, deliver and manage compelling experiences, proactively resolve issues, and create engaging upsell opportunities. This might seem elementary, but when you consider the number of channels available for interaction today, the task becomes more difficult.

According to Lorraine Schumacher, director, operations customer business intelligence, Verizon, Verizon has embarked on a speech analytics initiative that unifies customer feedback across wireline, wireless and enterprise business units. This rich data has been rolled into Verizon’s CX program and is delivering impressive results. The secret sauce for this endeavor is a product from Medallia. The solution captures, understands and enables Verizon to act on customer feedback at scale, across millions of customers, and provide insights and actions to teams across the organization in real-time. Further, this data can be packaged for executives to enrich business intelligence, or front-line support to improve engagement, troubleshooting, and mean-time to resolution.