Shopping and the Customer Experience: Zero Degrees of Separation

Some service providers and experts believe customers will get a better experience if they are allowed to help themselves with self-service features, an idea that works only as well as the order orchestration.

Comverse, for example, said its customer Orange UK is driving call center transaction down and seeing online, self-service transactions increase. “The cost savings is good for carriers, but it’s the customers who want to use this. They want to go online at 10 o’clock at night and not have to call during the day and sit on hold,” said Alice Bartram, chief marketing officer at Comverse.

Comverse has taken the idea of the unified view of customers and products seriously. This summer, the company launched its Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management Solution, which offers comprehensive BSS functionality from real-time rating, charging, promotions and session control, as well as active customer management that includes self-service and order management. It is built around that all-important single data model and single product catalog. Comverse has unified its once separate prepaid, postpaid and self-service solutions into a single system.

“From our perspective, to do this requires a BSS system unified around one data model and is deployed as a complete solution, not a collection of various pieces glued together with middleware,” Bartram said.

She agrees that a common data model affects all parts of the ordering process. “All these topics overlap. The unified data model approach supports not only billing, but ordering, self-service, merchandising and more. They all touch each other in some way,” Bartram said.

How they touch the customer is just as important. In his latest report on the billing space, Dan Baker, research director of Dittberner's OSS/BSS KnowledgeBase, said today’s billing systems have to reach out and touch customers in more ways than delivering a bill. “Today, it’s the merchandising and marketing role of billing software that’s delivering the greatest value for telecom carriers,” he said.

That justifies all the major billers’ strategic push to expand their portfolios and include order orchestration, marketing, advertising, self-service and other BSS/OSS functionality, and with his reference to merchandising lends credence to Champion’s view on how far to extend the concept of the customer experience.

It appears global company leaders agree that incorporating customer-centric processes can improve the customer experience. In a study called “The Executive Disconnect: The Strategic Alignment of Customer Service” conducted by Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company, 54 percent of global corporate executives said they planned to enhance the customer experience by adding technologies that supported customer-centric processes.

The study also showed a significant gap in the customer service that company leaders thought they were delivering and what they actually were. They typically had overestimated their companies’ commitment.

And as much focus as there is on the customer experience, 58 percent of companies still view their contact centers as operational rather than strategic and most use operational metrics rather than experience-based metrics to measure customer service.

Perhaps someone should orchestrate a change there, too.