Odd Combinations In D.C.

By Larry Lannon

I attended my first B/OSS Live! last week outside our nation’s capital. The program was terrific. So was the venue, though let’s face it, there is something different about Washington.

Most Americans have concluded D.C. is a unique city, whose sole purpose is the business of politics, currently an industry in deep, deep recession. Odd combinations are not uncommon on the banks of the Potomac.

For instance, B/OSS Live! concluded last Friday afternoon in Maryland, mere yards west of the Potomac and a few miles south of the Jefferson Memorial. The next day, about five miles due west, at Andrews Air Force Base (formally now known as Joint Base Andrews Naval Air Facility Washington, a name only a powerful and fundamentally befuddled bureaucracy could embrace), an odd foursome drew substantial press attention. President Barack Obama, Vice President Joseph Biden, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R.-Ohio) and Gov. John Kasich (R.-Ohio) played a single game of golf, noteworthy because the group bridged the partisan divide we hear so much about these days (which in itself suggests why our politics currently are so inept).

Odd combinations, I guess, are news in D.C.

Let me pair two of the B/OSS speakers in what may at first seem like an odd combination. Rob Riordan is executive vice president and director of Corporate Development at Nsight, a family “telco" based in Green Bay, Wisc., that serves a huge swathe of the Upper Midwest. Scott Rice is vice president of Customer and Billing Services, Sprint Nextel. Given their corporate provenance, they couldn’t be more different. But are they?

Riordan’s family has been in the business for a century, surviving the Great Depression,  the World Wars and numerous changes in the industry’s definitions and fortunes – and the company seems to be thriving like never before in the highly competitive, digital, mobile, broadband era.

Riordan’s lively presentation, the centerpiece of the Personalization Summit, was replete with numerous sharp jabs by the feisty Packer Backer at the national wireless companies with whom Nsight competes. The foundation of his presentation, however, was simple and profound. Nsight, Riordan emphasized, is not in the data business, the voice business, the broadband business – it is in the service business. Service means customer service, not some self-serving oxymoron that puts technology first, customers second.

Sprint’s well-known story needs little summary here. The national carrier has seen tough times in the past five years, and lived to tell the story. As the traditional blues saw goes, “What don’t kill me just makes me stronger." Sprint’s history is remarkably complicated, but the business illness that was threatening its life was simplicity itself: Customers were unhappy with their experience and were voting with their feet. The business was walking out the door a few years ago.

Rice’s wry presentation centered around how Sprint refocused on “the plumbing" of BSS to rebuild the customer experience and, using that tangible asset, rebuild its business. One of the interesting pieces of Rice’s talk was how its rebound strategy was focused sharply on the customer experience – and, incredibly, the recognition that it had ceased to put the customer first. Sure, Sprint tracked metrics galore to make sure it was making the progress it had to make, and certainly deployed sophisticated technology to enable its strategy. But the focus was on making sure it was forever focused on customer satisfaction.

Different companies in many ways, Nsight and Sprint have at least three things in common:

1. Both employ sophisticated network technologies, including BSS/OSS technologies, to enable increasingly powerful and sophisticated services for increasingly empowered customers.
2. Both focus on a common goal – ensuring customer satisfaction in an intensely challenging business and competitive environment.
3. Both prioritize the customer before the technology.

I do not know if Scott and Rob know one another. My guess is, however, that even if they do not, should fortune put them in the same place at the same time, they would have plenty to talk about and would probably find common ground pretty quickly. In part that is because I heard them both speak powerfully at B/OSS about the centrality of the customer experience to each of their companies.

And, in part, I believe that is also because competitors in the communications industry also have to be collaborative – or no one can achieve that fundamental goal of ensuring customer satisfaction for mobile, demanding customers whose service expectations do not respect network or business boundaries. I would love to hear that conversation, if Rob and Scott ever have it.

Competition based on a common goal does not mean separation, division, victory-or-death bitterness.

Back to the Air Force Base: I wonder who bought on the 19^th hole Saturday? Wonder what the conversation was like? Wonder if the “competitors" also realize how much they need one another to satisfy their customer?

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO ’s Communications Network.