With increasing competition and the convergence of the telecoms, media and entertainment industries, carriers are building new business models focusing on customer and service experience. Particularly in the highly competitive markets like US and Europe, where all players are offering similar products and services, telcos have already focused on delivering 'superior' customer experience as a key area where they can differentiate themselves from competitors, reduce churn and increase revenues.
Telcos in Asia Pacific are also getting the customer experience message, with tier-one operators like Telstra in Australia embarked on business transformation projects to make their networks and services more agile in meeting customer demands and future development. Even in emerging markets, which have been traditionally focused on price and customer acquisition, telcos are now more aware of the increased importance of customer experience, as the focus has shifted to margins and customer retention.
Consistent experience
Terry Woodcroft, director of product management for Intec's charging, billing and customer management products, said a typical problem telecom operators are having is ensuring that their customers have access to appropriate, accurate data to ensure that end-to-end interactions are as efficient and simple as possible.
Whether it's a sales order, a problem, a simple inquiry or follow-up activity, it is imperative that there is a single view of the customer throughout their lifecycle to promote efficiency and quick resolution. This is true regardless of the product set, the type of customer, their history or how they have contacted the operator.
Yet most telcos fail to create a consistent experience. Instead, they provide the customer with a siloed experience - where previous interactions are not visible when dealing with current ones, issues are not completely resolved and the resolution cycle is drawn out.
'The major issues stem from business processes focussed on delivering a particular service, rather than delivering an easy, seamless customer interaction for the bundled offer that meets the customer need. Unfortunately, business processes often reflect the underlying complexity of disparate legacy OSS/BSS architectures built up over years,' Woodcroft said.
The good news is that telcos increasingly realize that they must embed customer centricity in every fiber of the business, so that they can create a simplified and consistent experience for end-users.
The shift to a focus on simplifying the customer experience is evidenced by an increasing emphasis on customer needs by those parts of the operator's organization that are directly involved in dealing with customers, but also in areas like business development and business intelligence.
When telcos are looking to replace legacy billing systems, they need to be sure that they are considering how this will impact the customer, and what business processes and interactions the entire BSS has to support, rather than just concentrating on the billing component, Woodcroft said.
As such telcos are moving toward single integrated and convergent BSS/OSS architecture, and looking for more new integration approaches based on having a single customer and product database. OSS/BSS vendors are also developing news solutions, like self-care platforms and improving their subscriber data management products to provide a more comprehensive solution that can cater to customer preference or behavior, which includes business intelligence or location-related services that provide a broader solution to their telco customers.