Is the new industry buzzword, 'customer experience,' more than a service provider's ability to effectively manage customers throughout the service lifecycle‾ As wireline, wireless, mobile, cable and content providers compete for the same customers - irrespective of the service or the technology they offer - a positive customer experience is the new 'make-it-or-break-it' factor. To prosper, service providers must embrace a new definition of 'customer experience,' which will be centered around meeting customer expectations and needs, even before they become customers.
If customer experience is the new key differentiator, what change in management is needed‾
Goodbye old telco 1.0
Managing a customer lifecycle was considered a bottom-up process of collecting customer usage information from network traffic, devices, content servers and databases for analysis of trends and preferences. That would engender deeper insight into customer service quality. Those internal measures traditionally helped service providers align resource performance with service definitions, and service level agreements prescribed by business contracts (assuming such 'contracts' existed).
From an OSS/BSS standpoint, the notion was that an effective customer experience would result if customer-facing processes driven by CRM and billing information that aligned with business analytics information. The use of the data contained in those systems would enable processes to provide a customer experience strategy that extended to a limited subset of key, valuable customers.
Sounds like a pretty interesting strategy, right‾ It's not that simple and here's why.
Hello to the outside-in way
Here's the catch. The experience of a customer with a service provider starts even before he or she becomes a customer. Like automotive, retail and Web 2.0 sectors, the communications industry needs an outside-in view of the customer's experience at the point of delivery, and then go backward through all the steps leading up to that point. That's how a Wal-Mart, a Ford or Virgin thinks as they plan their campaigns. How does the show floor look, and how will you carry the product out or drive it away‾ All of that is considered ahead of time.
The outside-in concept is still a new, poorly understood concept in the communications industry because service providers think only of what they can measure or manage in their pipes - an inside-out view. It won't be easy to shift thinking to an outside-in view of 'managing' the full end-to-end customer lifecycle, which requires an alignment of customer expectations with the product capabilities.
But, like it or not it will be necessary. The customer experience will have to start before you have a customer because you have to think of what you are providing and the infrastructure around that. Sounds trite, but in practice service providers don't think about it.
In a world of social networking, the experience of a customer with his or her potential provider of choice is influenced by his or her interactions with a different type of network - the social network, which is clearly more complex because its structure is determined by the expectations, images and emotional connections a customer generates in relation to that provider, even before he or she becomes a customer.
In the telco 2.0 world, customer experience can be managed properly and accurately by adding the ability to measure and to analyze pre-customer, pre-service needs, and to drive customer-facing processes.