The customer is king, right? Well it hasn’t always felt like that to many consumers of telecommunications services. They feel locked into their cell phone contracts. Hey, remember the dropped calls and sporadic broadband connectivity? And when they need help, they’re relegated to the never-ending maze that is the customer service experience.
But with the current economic climate, communications service providers are being reminded their best assets are their customers. The challenge now is to shore up the customer experience, which is easier said than done.
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| Nokia Siemens Networks' Brad Cornet |
Most operators are sitting on a treasure trove of customer data, which could be leveraged in part to improve the customer experience. However, much of that valuable information is locked up and not readily available for analysis. “With traditional siloed databases within different operational functions of the organization, you have customer care in one database and customer relationship management in another,” said Brad Cornett, head of service management and charging, North America, at Nokia Siemens Networks.
But finally operators are moving away from the silo approach to a more centralized, federated data model that provides a single view of the customer, according to Cornett, who cautions that such a shift is not as cut-and-dried as it might appear. “I would compare it to climbing a mountain; if you go straight up, you’d keep falling down,” he explained. “But if you take switchbacks, spend a little more time and get a smooth transition between phases, you’ll get up the mountain.”
And getting up the mountain is the only way telcos can remain competitive in a world where they are confronting so-called “over-the-top” service providers such as Google, Facebook and YouTube, said Elisabeth Rainge, director of NGN (next-generation networks) operations at IDC. “These Web 2.0 type companies are able to access and use the information of their users’ behaviors as a way of delivering them better service.”
She added that in the traditional telco world, subscriber data — also known as customer proprietary network information (CPNI) — could be sold to third-party companies for marketing purposes. However the Telecommunications Act of 1996 put a stop to that. But that doesn’t change the fact that operators have a tremendous wealth of information about their customers. “Primarily due to the hodge-podge of operational and network systems, they have not done a good job of accessing this information, even though it’s their crown jewels in terms of understanding the customer,” she said.
