Foster customer experience as a ‘culture’

In order to enhance every element of the experience and ensure the customer remains at the centre of all business decisions, CSPs will need to foster customer experience as a ‘culture’. It will be extremely important that the C-level leadership within the business provide the right direction and vision for the company. Leading by example, this influence filters down through the rest of the company so that the importance of CEM embodies everyone within the organisation. To achieve this, CSPs will need to re-position their systems and processes to support more integrated product management strategies. It is also important that businesses take the opportunity to learn from their customers through their smart devices and ensure they have efficient business processes and infrastructure in place to make use of real-time customer feedback.

Constant incremental innovation and learning from customer behaviour is a necessary pre-requisite to predicting what the customer will need in the future. At Tecnotree, we work with our customers to utilise information available through the standard BSS stack to enhance the customer experience throughout the customer lifecycle. By understanding their customers’ behaviour, CSPs will be able to alter or create products quickly, while ensuring relevance to the end-user by recommending products, services and actions that will enable better engagement.

Shift telco business models to improve CEM

One of the biggest steps that CSPs are taking to contribute to customer experience is through the move to subscription based revenue models. Various try-and-buy and freemium business models are now widely available in the telecom space and CSPs have been forced to respond, both in terms of their end-user offerings, as well as packaging traffic and other services to their OTT partners. With traditional metered subscriptions still largely being the backbone of the CSP business model, some creative thinking will be required for them to adopt new strategies to improve CEM. 

CSPs have currently found it difficult to have traditional metered subscriptions and freemium models work side by side, but we are beginning to see more interest in exploring “Internet style” models through parallel brands or “friendly MVNOs”. With these types of approaches there is a possibility for CSPs to have the best of both worlds and explore new ideas without prematurely jeopardising their core business revenues.

Enhance partnership models

Until recently, many CSPs have been somewhat stuck in the past, using mainstream partnering models that still reflect the premium SMS era structures. However, in some markets we are now beginning to see CSPs taking a more proactive approach to bundling services with OTT partners. One factor in this trend is Facebook’s strong push for its Basic Services concept, which in some areas seems to act as a catalyst for bringing CSPs and non-Facebook-affiliated OTTs together.

From a wholesale standpoint, to enhance customer experience this means that the entire value chain must align in the way that network access and services are packaged and priced. In order for small and agile OTT partners to remain interested, retail and partner revenue share, together with roaming, packaging and pricing, must be transparent and predictable, especially where partners are operating across operator and geographical boundaries.

Putting customer experience at the forefront of a CSP’s business will be a challenge, however by modernising processes and prioritising the need to have scalable business models in place, they can identify opportunities for investment and form the strategic partnerships needed to grow new revenue streams. It is also important for CSPs to create a company culture that understands its customers and listens to their feedback, to ensure that products are relevant and best meet customers’ needs. By addressing these changes and adopting an approach that looks beyond their traditional offerings, CSPs will be able to reshape their business, expand service portfolios, and thus grow customer value in order to succeed in a highly competitive landscape.

telecomstechnews.com