Enriching the experience with value-added services

Sweetening bundles and offerings with value-added services is another way to attract and retain customers and improve the customer experience. Again, by listening to the voice of the customer, network operators can zero in on the zingers.

For small business customers, service providers should play the role of business partner, such as evidenced by Verizon’s SMB unit. Popular offerings from Verizon include e-learning, webinars, a small business blog, and partner discounts, like savings at office supply stores.

For consumers, zero-rating the most popular apps is an effective strategy that has the added benefit of enabling the service provider to lean on a third-party to offset mobile data costs. The list here is long, but some representative examples include Deutsche Telekom’s partnership with Spotify, Telefónica’s OTT partnership with Evernote, and Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, which aims to zero-rate basic services in order to accelerate the uptake of mobile in the developing world. Airtel is an early adopter of Facebook’s initiative, and now offers 13 no-data-impact apps to its user base in Zambia.

Enterprise customers are seeking greater symmetry in global service pricing, with a goal of flattening and consolidating these costs. They are also looking for the flexibility to spin up and rapidly scale (up or down) new services in new regions.

Strategies that work

In this era of intense competitive pressure, it is crucial that CSPs understand their customers and can anticipate and flex with evolving demands. As we can learn from Verizon, Vodafone, Telefónica, BT, Vodafone, and others, ascertaining and acting upon the voice of the customer is essential, and delivers real results. These results are quantifiable as well. According to NICE Systems, an increase in NPS of just 11 points translates to more than $150 million in additional revenue for its customers. This proves true in enterprise, consumer, and SMB markets.

The service providers referenced here have invested in capturing the voice of the customer across all channels, aligning the product catalog with customers’ needs in each segment, and integrating the voice of the customer horizontally and vertically within the organization. These companies are also: investing in solutions that deliver a subscriber-level view of network and application performance; enhancing online chat and self-care capabilities; and incorporating desirable value-added services in a low-cost or subsidized manner. Customer experience management, in many ways, is simply listening, acting, measuring results, following up, and then repeating this process.