Operators and their front line care organizations are facing a financial and customer perfect storm. They are pressured to cut capital spending, even in the presence of escalating support costs due to device complexity and increasing handset life spans. At the same time, subscribers, ever more precious in times of economic contraction, are wooed by competitors with all-in pricing and hefty device subsidies. Churn becomes a death spiral. How did operators get into this predicament, and is there a near-term way out that makes sense? First, a bit of history.
How We Got Here
It wasn’t always this difficult. Phones were phones, and PCs were PCs. Data, if it existed, was limited to a bit of WAP traffic and nothing else. A privileged few touted BlackBerrys, supplied by their employers. Operator help desks were staffed and trained to handle the simple interactions they fielded: billing, upgrades and fading signals. Except for a few applications, what was delivered on the phone was made static when the device shipped, with no changes post-fabrication. Enter the smartphone.
In a bid to increase data usage (leveraging their large investments in next generation infrastructure), operators subsidized high-end smartphones and heavily marketed the services they supported. E-mail, multi-media messaging (MMS), video, and Internet browsing became the rule rather than the exception, and by the end of 2008 more than 65 percent of all new devices shipped in the United States supported these capabilities. BlackBerrys, iPhones, Symbians, Windows Mobile and other advanced phones, with subsidized pricing below the magic $100 barrier, entered the mass market. But there is a dark side to this growth.
E-mail settings break. Media players don’t operate as expected. Phones are rushed to market with sub-par audio, network or battery performance. The number of calls into frontline care increase, call lengths (average hold times) grow, first-time problem resolutions drop and the overall customer experience suffers. Frontline care organizations are just not staffed or trained for this new reality, and the operator can’t go out and throw bodies at smartphones that cost four times more to support than simpler feature phones. Additional expenses, with an associated negative impact on profitability, only serve to raise OPEX while not addressing the underlying problem.
Consider a typical e-mail support call. The subscriber, after what may seem like an eternity on the automated help system, finally reaches a live care representative. What usually follows is a set of questions and responses — phone model, network coverage, applications installed, firmware version and the like. If the subscriber is even capable of finding most of this information, they are already five minutes or more into the call. Troubleshooting comes next. The CSR requests e-mail settings, many of which the subscriber may never have heard of before. Tell me this and punch in that. Did that solve it? No. Let’s try something else. Fifteen or 20 minutes later, the problem may be solved — or it may not be. The subscriber may or may not be satisfied, and the CSR is exhausted.
