Service providers want to cut costs from their operations, and a popular place to look for savings has been customer care. After all, pings to the call center get very expensive. But something else should be driving initiatives for customer self-care: loyalty. Loyalty can increase retention and improve the chances of maintaining customers even through the trials and tribulations of marketing next-generation services.
“When you have a robust interface that customers are happy with, the stickiness factor makes it difficult for them to go to the competi-tion,” says Paul Hughes, vice president, Enabling Technologies, at Yan-kee Group. “The more touch points you have into a customer, the stronger the bond is going to be.”
Hughes believes this will be an effective and necessary customer retention tool in regions such as North America and Europe, where market saturation is pushing service providers for ways to stand out.
Next-gen self-care systems need to be much more robust than traditional systems in which users have had to navigate voice response systems or Web forms. They must support voice, video and data services, which comprise larger portions of service provider revenue streams. Self-care might include activation of broadband connections, or the ability to identify system or network problems. Users are becoming more tech-savvy and rather than wait on hold, they’d rather be empowered to detect and repair some problems, such as installing security protection against hackers, viruses and other Internet issues.
On the wireless side, users already enjoy over-the-air activation and service enrollment applications, in addition to balance checks, top-ups, feature add/drops, and balance transfers for mobile wallet type applications.
In order for self-care to go the next step without causing more problems than it solves, operators have to begin pushing for solutions that enable them to better manage multiple touch points on the back end.
According to TM Forum Chairman Keith Willetts, “You need a seamless front door that opens up behind-the-scenes to customer profiles, credit card information, user records, service information — literally dozens of systems that have to be consistent and line up in terms of the data they support.”
Willetts says the key challenge in achieving that is the fragmentation of the data, as well as the inaccuracy of that data, which Willetts warns can make the customer experience awful. He accuses service providers of being lackadaisical in their approach to self-care and thinks they should pay more attention to identifying the overlaps and consis-tencies that would push self-care to the next level.
