Driving Cable Customer Loyalty From the Back Office

By Carl Davies

Preserving customer loyalty is extremely important to any company, but it is especially critical in today’s competitive TV market. Cable providers can deliver the type of service experience that drives customer loyalty with the right back office solutions in place.

According to 2011 Convergys US Customer Scorecard Research, cable-customer loyalty is influenced by the quality of the cable company’s service interactions.

Convergys research on the cable customer service experience reveals that:

• Nearly eight out of 10 cable customers say that in the past year the quality of service provided by their cable company has either stayed the same or is worse.
• Only five out of 10 cable customers say they are loyal to the company.
• Nearly four out of 10 customers who had a bad experience left their cable company.
• Nearly six out of 10 people who have heard about somebody else’s bad experience on social media either stopped doing busi­ness or avoided a company.

With a Smart BSS infrastructure, cable providers can strengthen customer loyalty by using customer data from service interactions to “know" each customer and deliver a personalized experience.  Since such systems deliver unprecedented scalability, cable providers can apply this personalization to millions of customers and across billions of transactions. This allows providers  to respond to ser­vice needs proactively – even before the customer is aware of an issue – or creat­e customized service packages loaded with subtle feature variations defined by an individual’s known preferences.

In order to provide customer experiences that drive satisfaction and enhance loyalty, cable providers should consider investing in innovative solutions with loyalty-driving features, including:

• Real-time convergent charging
• Predictive analytics and business intelligence
• Active mediation and policy management
• Intelligent notification
• Social decisioning

The gateway to customer satisfaction and increased loyalty is clearly an intelligent back office where a sophisticated IT infrastructure enables the real-time integration of billing data, business intelligence, predic­tive analytics and CRM to create an up-to-the-minute portrait of the customer. With that portrait, a cable service provider can deliver a personalized, quality service experience via agent interaction or self-service options to each and every customer.  

Carl Davies is the global marketing director for cable, broadband, and satellite at  Convergys Corporation.  Follow Carl on Twitter: @CableCarl