Apertio Survey Asks What it Takes to ‘Own’ the Customer

These attributes will drive the need for “real-time” access to data. “Addressing QoS issues on the fly will become more and more important,” says Halton, noting that the gap between those that have real-time capability and those that don’t will become more apparent.

Though operators understand they must leverage real-time information, most concede that real-time services will stretch the capabilities of their existing networks, as well as CRM, billing and OSSs that rely on data from those networks. For that reason, there was evidence that CRM, billing and OSS would have to go beyond historic, time-lapsed data to handle real-time, dynamic information. Then, operators could customer satisfaction with tailored products.

In the study, more than 80 percent of respondents consider real-time data to be either important, or very important in improving marketing services and customer satisfaction. About 84 percent agreed customer satisfaction is “very important.”

According to Halton, that means the days of waiting for reports and warehousing data related to subscriber activity are probably numbered. Rather, companies will want to modify and influence services “on the fly” when delivering services.

In addition to increasing intelligence about customer preferences, respondents indicated that costs associated with servicing and maintaining customers need to be streamlined. According to Halton’s observations, operators pay as much as $9 per customer for every call to a call center. “In managing churn reactively, operators incur enormous costs,” he says.

For that reason, it was not surprising that executives in the survey referred to proactive customer care, and customer self-care as very high priorities. “If a handset is not provisioned with a data service, a self-care portal to provision the service would take the burden off of the call center,” says Halton. Operators in the survey believed it would be a “quick win” any time they could eliminate the need for a call to the call center.

In the survey, executives also communicated a desire for sophisticated ID management and security to round out their services, which increasingly will involve third parties. That will clearly push subscriber data management to a new level.