Letter from the Editor

By: Tim Young

“We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It's our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.”
– Jeff Bezos
CEO of Amazon

What I find remarkable about the quote above isn’t that Jeff Bezos said it; the guy clearly understands the power of creating a high-quality, seamless, and low-friction customer experience. What’s remarkable is when he said it: back in 2004 in an interview with Bloomberg Business.

That’s long before the Fire tablets, TV streaming device or the failed phone launched. In fact, it’s before most people really knew they even wanted tablets, streaming media devices, or smartphones. It’s before the Kindle launched, and before e-readers were really a "thing." It’s long before they were developing original content like the award-winning Transparent… or really any media content at all. There wasn’t even an Amazon Prime subscription available yet. Amazon Web Services had just launched two years before and was still a relatively small enterprise, and Amazon wasn’t even a particularly wide-reaching online retailer yet. That was the same year, for example, that they began selling shoes.

So this was before the drones and the talkative gadgets and the Dash buttons in the cupboard and the subscription diaper delivery, back when Amazon scarcely resembled the company that now enjoys a $250 billion market cap (it was around $17.5 billion back in 2004) and which serves as the go-to online purveyor for millions of customers—myself included.

And why do I fork over so many of my hard-earned dollars to Team Bezos? Because they make it all so easy. I like being able to order things with one click and am that guy who can’t be bothered to manually enter his credit card number every time he orders something and cannot allow myself to pay for shipping. I have actually walked away from an online checkout process and decided to buy from Amazon instead because it was worth a dollar or two to save the time and headache of purchasing from a new seller.

Amazon has worked very hard to cultivate this customer experience. They carefully monitor the customer experience and, for example, refund streaming video purchases if the quality was low or there was excessive buffering. They sell excellent hardware at break-even prices so they can make more on content. (I know that in my home alone, we have two Fire tablets and two Kindles, and the combined purchase price of all of them was less than we paid for a single iPad. Amazon’s reward? We buy lots of books and instant video from them.) They ship quickly, and in some cities you can get select Amazon items delivered almost as quickly as you can get a pizza. It’s a pervasive customer experience.

In this issue of Pipeline, we discuss how the customer experience is being enhanced by companies from across the integrated communications and entertainment (ICE) technology space. We explore ways in which CSPs can create a customer-first culture and explore why subscribers turn against their carriers. We talk about the digital experience and how people are sometimes the missing technology component in delivering top-flight customer experiences. We deconstruct the CEM label, which has become a bit of a catch-all, and examine how CSPs can move move toward data-driven, personalized and contextual marketing. We also dive into how the customer experience is monitored and improved in the Internet of Things, and talk about how service quality assurance delivers an improved experience for all.

We hope you enjoy, and if there’s anything we can do to enhance your experience with Pipeline, drop me a line at editor@pipelinepub.com.

Cheers,

Tim Young
Editor-in-Chief