Every aspect of customer care is impacted significantly by triple play. Even the cable MSOs that have been offering the telecom trinity for some time now have yet to advance their care practices significantly. This is not to say that services aren’t being supported or that customers are disgruntled. What’s at issue is the difference between the level of sophistication found today and the level it’s generally believed will be needed to compete effectively and maximize the multi-service revenue opportunity. It is often suggested as a joking half-truth that service providers can’t expect to support the triple play when they don’t even know one customer from another when they call. In reality, this is neither a joke nor a half truth. MSOs and telcos are improving their visibility of the customer. . This move is not meant to improve customer care as much perhaps as to improve their ability to sell more to each customer and, in doing so, keep them from churning to another provider.
Status Check
To understand what telcos and MSOs are up against, it’s helpful to look at where they stand today. With technological progress as a measuring stick, customer care has not advanced very far. All kinds of care technologies exist, and many of them are staples of other industries, but in telecom the uptake has been pretty slow. MSOs are ahead of telcos, but even so “are just now starting to deliver [the ability] to pass customer information along with an IVR routed call,” explains Dwayne Ruffin, vice president of product management – broadband services, for CSG Systems. Ruffin lives and breathes billing and care technology for some of the largest MSOs in North America and says that the idea of integrating the call center desktop has only recently gained attention. This is due in part to the fact thatMSOs realize they need to see things from the customer perspective, not only a product perspective. While there has been some progress with integration, many call centers remain separated along product lines and customer care relies on IVRs to route calls to the proper support centers.
“If you go into a telco call center, the number of systems they have is mind boggling,” says Andrew Cardegna, solution partner with BusinessEdge Solutions. Though swivel-chair integration has been replaced by Alt-Tab integration (the shortcut in Windows to switch from one window to the next), agents still must learn many different applications and manually enter the same information multiple times into different systems. This fragmented process reflects a disintegrated back-end that makes new service introduction and customer visibility difficult, if not impossible. “Everyone has a different view of you, and it’s not as a customer,” says Cardegna. “Trying to get a customer view for any of these guys is a challenge, and they aren’t feeding these new products into existing infrastructure, they are adding new infrastructure.”
Adding new infrastructure means adding new silos to manage the new products – a step away from integrated operations across all services. ILECs in particular can’t afford to add more silos as most are currently consolidating operational areas both within and across recently merged and acquired units. As a result they have “a fragmented view of problems…It’s hard for them to provide order status or any integrated support,” says Cardegna. Overall, he says, most service providers today are somewhere between just making the product work to being able to recognize multi-service customers and treat them accordingly. Cardegna admits that “at this point, it’s not very sophisticated.”
The Way Forward
The next several years will be a transition period as service providers adjust to the demands and intricacies of their new businesses. “It’s a different kind of structure to support multiple services where you are competing with all kinds of operators and moving into new types of marketing,” says Curt Champion, vice president of market and product strategy for Convergys’ Information Management group. Champion says there are four primary areas of focus that must change and improve to support triple play effectively – point of contact; customer-centricity; bundling and discounting; and bill presentment.
The point of contact is not one point – it’s a growing number of points such as the monthly bill; e-billing; self-care portals; the set-top IPG; the traditional call center; and more to come. Improving points of contact goes in lock step with improving customer-centricity and thus knowing the customer much better from support and marketing perspectives. “The types of challenges MSOs have had in rolling out triple play services come from ease of use with client interaction,” says Champion. “So number one is having a single view of the customer.”
Most major MSOs have already moved to convergent billing systems say both Convergys’ Champion and CSG’s Ruffin, which puts them slightly ahead of most LECs which have not. The effort to move to consolidated customer information is an enormous one for telcos and it’s what’s driving all of the talk about SOA, web services, and common information models. Having all customer data available from a common source is especially important to support the growing number of front-end contact points that need to present a complete view of customers and services, including self-care.
The Rise of Self-Care
“One of the real competitive drivers has been expanding the number of contact points,” says Champion. “You’ve seen a lot more of the triple play providers accelerating more web self-care applications,” he says. Ideally, self-care would be extended to provide complete service control and instant support to the user. The operational mountains that have to be climbed to achieve this are enormous, however, so there must be another impetus. “Most thinking around self-care is around call avoidance,” says BusinessEdge’s Cardegna. “People talk about customer preference and experience, but if someone is measuring, they’re thinking that they can avoid a certain number of calls by putting certain functions on the web.”
Call centers are one of the few areas where real metrics that can be translated into dollar values are measured in the telecom world. There’s a strong relationship between reducing call center volume and reducing cost. It stands to reason that while ideally service providers would like to use self-care to sell more – and they are trying to – the real business case for customer care investment still gravitates toward basic call center metrics that deal with reducing the number and duration of calls to avoid costs.
The problem with making self-care all about diverting calls is that it overlooks the customer and the importance of high quality follow-on support for things like self-installation. “End users make mistakes, blame them on the provider, and then churn,” explains Randy Custeau, worldwide marketing manager for Agilent Technologies’ OSS group. Stories abound, for example, of telcos sending self-install kits to DSL customers who were so intimidated they never opened the box and cancelled service shortly after ordering. It’s awfully difficult to sell IPTV and other interactive IP-based entertainment services if the customer’s broadband connection isn’t installed.
Telcos Unprepared to Entertain
The entertainment business is all about making a strong first impression and marketing effectively in a targeted way. “Television is entertainment,” says Pete Pifer, president and CEO for ETI Software. “Entertainment is something that has to be marketed, and cable companies are already good at it.” This is another area where MSOs have more experience and a head start over telcos. Pifer explains that telcos large and small tend to struggle with packaging services, and the software systems they have are not adequate to do it in the new world. “Can your system handle packages and immediate provisioning?” asks Pifer. “If I want to upgrade to HBO, within seconds I’ve got it (from the MSO) and it doesn’t involve the workforce,” he says. MSOs are also moving toward a la carte channel bundling which will require more sophisticated packaging software.
Beyond instant delivery, there are many subtle aspects of the television business that telcos just aren’t prepared to support yet. “MSOs run a lot of promotions and local ad insertions. Local ads get three minutes per hour and if there’s no ad running, the MSOs run their own ads. Telcos will need ad insertion equipment to promote their new offerings, and cable companies already have all of that.” The stakes will grow on the advertising side of things as interactive advertising enters the picture and is a key aspect of one-to-one marketing and service personalization.
“MSOs are now trying to target a person by understanding their current subscription tier, figuring out what might interest them and then ranking the offerings so the customer can select from them – real one-to-one marketing,” says Ruffin. “The day is not far off where you’ll have one-to-one interactive advertising and services should follow that model in lockstep,” he says. Getting to this level of customer detail and understanding usage patterns is critical to supporting triple play.Once again the customer really isn’t the driver, but rather sales and new business partners.
Entertainment content providers – the major conglomerates in particular – shape their offerings around information collected from ratings, market trials, focus groups and other methods that try to segment the customer base and best pinpoint their usage or viewing habits in order to cater to them. “In this disaggregated world, all the advertising we’re used to breaks down and the ability to measure who’s doing what when and pushing that back out is really important,” says Tony Kern, practice leader for Deloitte Consulting’s media and entertainment group. As the industry moves to one-to-one mode, the informational burden becomes much greater for telcos and MSOs alike.
Today, this sort of information isn’t being collected because the industry isn’t in a one-to-one mode yet. Kern further explains that an efficient feedback loop between communications and entertainment partners needs to emerge that will support the entire content supply chain and its distribution channels. Before reaching that point of sophistication, however, quality is an immediate concern for media providers because “you can damage your brand by having a bad experience the first time. If you’re going to roll it out, you better have it worked out,” he says.
Where Billing Stands
Having these services worked out means, in part, being able to bill for them effectively and accurately while discounting across services, eventually on a customer-by-customer or segment-by-segment basis. This was very difficult to accomplish when products were spread across different billing systems. As MSOs have converged, they’ve opened the door to more sophisticated discounting capabilities. Such capabilities are used today to discount across the standard service package. The capability exists, however, to discount any individual service and even to quote and apply discounts on the fly as the customer is in the midst of ordering new services, be they subscription based or one-time use. Ruffin explains that MSOs see the set-top box taking on a greater role in quality management, usage recording and policy execution. Regardless, telcos are likely to struggle to take advantage of these technical capabilities, once again because of the disparity in their billing environments.
Where to Start?
All of the problems and challenges telcos and MSOs face are enough to fill volumes. How to begin moving forward is the important question. Three areas of interest that need to see change first are billing, order management and the way customer data is managed so that it can ultimately support converged operations.
Order Management
Once again, MSOs are ahead of the game in converging their operations. “What they are trying to do is look like one converged operational group,” says Joe Frost, vice president of marketing for Jacobs Rimmell. “The reality is that it will be one portal, but the change requests will end up in three different departments.” He explains that one strategy his company is helping MSOs pursue is one that focuses on order management and translating orders back into the distinct silos as an interim step toward real operational convergence. “We take any of those order management channels, translate the commands to a standard language and implement the changes.” This also helps support the ongoing customer data migration because the data that’s collected in the new process helps build out the complete customer view down the road and helps to insure that data is synchronized across the existing silos. This order management or cross-domain approach is a good first step because it is infrastructure that can be used for the long haul, but at the same time gives the provider some convergent ability in customer interactions without having to integrate the entire back-end.
Integrating that back-end will be the big challenge because there are so many systems and the scope of the data involved is monstrous. But moving to a complete customer view must happen. “The big challenge is getting the organization to stick to a consistent approach to data management across all the various units,” says Frost. If individual units don’t buy into the whole data picture, the long term process of becoming customer-centric is undermined.
The problem many carriers have in getting to centralized data is that customers are identified in different ways. “Everyone has a different view of you…the mobile guys see you as a number, the cable operator as an address, the telco as a phone number,” says BusinessEdge’s Cardegna. To deal with this issue, CSG’s Ruffin explains that his company has “decoupled the customer information from the dwelling. We separated the account and location from a common customer key. That key had to be one that could identify the customer across multiple databases.” Using a key approach like this helps in two ways. First, it gives a common reference point for building a complete picture of the customer. And second, it sets the stage for subscriber and service mobility. Though such capabilities are not offered yet, they represent the big promise beyond today’s triple play.
Bill Design
Bill design is often overlooked amidst the technical discussion, but it’s one of the most important aspects of transitioning customers to and driving triple play services. One of the first issues is sticker shock – the idea that a customer gets a bill for converged services and is surprised by the larger total. There’s a risk that this can discourage usage. “I see service providers avoiding sticker shock by migrating into bundled services. Every one of the carriers we work with says their customers are knocking on their door for a richer bundle of services,” says Ron Whaley, president of OSG Billing Services. Whaley explains that successful operators are using the bill to demonstrate the value of the bundle and clearly communicate the discounts a customer receives, or will receive, for having or adding multiple services.
“A lot of uptake relates to bill design,” says Whaley. “I’m a huge believer and have helped providers to design a bill that makes it easy for the consumer to understand the services they have today, the services they are offered that they have signed up for, and what adding any of those services will mean to their monthly cost.” This approach provides the dual benefit of marketing new services in a simply targeted way while also demonstrating the value of the bundle. This is simple, but it’s a critical step forward. If not for the sake of the customer, carriers should realize, explains Whaley, that a confusing bill leads directly to a call into the call center, “and you just added more to the cost of sale for that service,” he says.
e-Billing
If offloading costs is a concern in billing and customer care, then it stands to reason that carriers would push e-billing as hard as they can. They have for nearly a decade now, but the average take rate is “only about 10 percent” says Whaley. He explains that carriers have been using empty space on their paper bills to promote e-billing adoption, and that’s space that can be used for something better. So, the opportunity cost associated with the general failure to drive e-bill adoption adds to the real cost involved. Carriers are wising up, however, and recognizing that whether paper or electronic, the value of the bill as a communication piece ,outweighs the need to drive customers away from paper bills.
It’s clear that customer care has a long way to go before we arrive at truly customer-centric capabilities. In the early days, the focus is clearly on sales and marketing to drive new service uptake. The assumption is that service uptake will reduce churn, but this may be a backwards point of view. Happy customers that feel they are being informed and cared for are more likely to buy. Confusing rate plans may have helped carriers create profit in the past, but the same strategy won’t fly in the triple play simply because the market is too competitive and the leaders – cable MSOs - are already taking steps to be more customer friendly with cross-product discounts and very clear bills. Agilent’s Custeau explains that, “the difference with triple play is that because the market is oversaturated, the ability for customers to swap providers is almost too easy. Because of that, (service providers) can’t fail at customer experience.” The question is, is improving sales and marketing the way to a better customer experience? It’s too early to tell.
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