Customer Experience Management: Still a Long Way to Go

Service providers aren’t exactly throwing money at the challenge of improving the customer experience, but they are showing a willingness to spend on solutions they think will help, particularly if their operational expenses are lowered in the process. But they would be even more willing to spend if only they could define exactly what the customer experience should be and how to measure it.

Amdocs commissioned Yankee Group to study current and future investments by service providers in delivering a quality customer experience and the key performance indicators they will use to track it. Yankee Group issued a study this summer called “Beyond the Customer Experience Hype: Where Are Service Providers Today in Delivering the Ideal Customer Experience?” The study showed that service providers have neither a common cross-functional view of their customers nor consistent business processes in place to deliver the experience they want to. Worse yet, they have no definition for the customer experience itself.

The global study of approximately 150 service providers in the wireless, wireline, cable and satellite markets of the United States, U.K., France and Germany, found that “although service providers are transforming their business and operations support systems (BSS/OSS) to address the obstacles they believe are preventing them from delivering a differentiated customer experience, nearly 50 percent do not have a clear definition of what the customer experience should be.”

“We wanted to get a feel for where service providers are as they make that move into that direction,” said Scott Kolman, managing director of product marketing at Amdocs.

The study also identified the main obstacles for delivering a more personalized customer experience. In addition to the lack of an integrated customer view and inconsistent business processes, service providers are hindered by disconnects across multiple business lines and internal information silos.

The good news is that 70 percent of service providers believe

business processes have a direct impact on the customer experience. However, 28 percent of them do not have dedicated resources to manage their internal business processes. Nor do they have the proper key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the customer experience.

Calling it the last remaining differentiator between service providers, Sheryl Kingstone, director at Yankee Group, said, “Service providers today see the value in investments to better their customer experience, but many lack the holistic vision necessary to determine what this experience needs to be and an effective strategy to address both systems and business processes to assure a successful, low-risk transformation.”

Kolman said 61 percent of respondents said they were in the midst of personalizing or simplifying the customer experience, even if they weren’t sure what the end result should be. The survey also showed that reducing operating cost was still the number one driver for transforming their businesses.

“That’s no surprise,” Kolman said. “It will always be that way. But the next important driver was improving the customer experience. It was very close.”

Some of the efforts for achieving this were around creating more flexibility in the way service providers operated in order to be more responsive. They focused on simplifying touch points for ordering and support.

Other places service providers are investing include digital content management for their own content as well as content through branded portals; master data management that can consolidate customer, product and network data which can unify BSS and OSS systems; adoption of SOAs; and adoption of more customer-focused KPIs (47 percent listed this.)

“A lot of the KPIs service providers use today are more inside-out indicators rather than outside-in, meaning they are more operational in nature rather than customer-focused,” Kolman said. “It will be critical to leverage information about the customer as an asset. But it is not a trivial effort to leverage.”

Those are the traditional voice-related KPIs such as average call handling time, speed of response, the number of first-time trouble resolutions and the time to provision new services. “These are all still very useful, but they don’t tell the whole story,” Kolman said.

Although the need for new KPIs is recognized, the particular measurements have not been defined. They could be different for each service provider depending on what customer they are going after. The KPIs for a low-cost provider will be different from a provider going after the high-end customer.