You Don’t Know Where You’re Going Until You Know Where You’ve Been

The end of the year offers a time to reflect on the past 12 months before we quickly shift toward exploring the possibilities of the new year.

In 2011, service providers devised new business models that allowed them to begin offering more personalized mobile networks. These networks were constructed to support the increased number of devices at a person’s fingertips; a number which is multiplied when taking all members of a household into account. Bill shock was an obvious hot-button topic, while increased focus on convergent charging and the customer experience arose as elements of the solution.

So what can we expect in 2012 as service providers continue working to perfect the customer experience?

Exponential Customer Experience

Service providers are looking to continue improving the customer relationship in 2012, creating seamless experiences across data and video services, over fixed and mobile networks. We believe service providers will redouble their efforts with their existing customers, ensuring that their needs and desires are met to increase customer retention and loyalty.

Today’s consumers expect their service provider to deliver good coverage and quality – that’s a given. Here’s the next battlefield: In order to win customer loyalty, service providers must focus on getting to know their customers better – and then work to offer them truly personalized experiences.

Also, social media will continue to take its place as a growing channel of customer service. Service providers will improve their ability to more consistently monitor conversations across social channels, and in turn use these outlets to quickly defuse potential problems before they spiral into full-blown crises, engage in industry conversations, and provide consumer support and guidance.

Replacing Data Plans With an Overall Data Experience

People today use their mobile devices for nearly everything – and the resulting explosion of data usage leads directly to capacity crunch and slowed networks. To prevent this, service providers will continue to move away from unlimited or flat-rate mobile data plans and toward tailored offerings based on individual customer usage profiles. This evolution in pricing will also enable consumers to share data packages across devices or family members. The goal is to keep pricing plans personalized, yet simple and easy to use. Increasingly, people are no longer in search of the perfect data plan, but rather a total data experience that meets their needs today and can be easily changed as they add or drop devices and services.  In 2012, flexibility will be the main keyword.

Making More of Our Wallets

While topics such as M2M, digital wallets and cloud computing have been discussed for over a decade, in 2012 we will finally begin to see mass adoption and application of these technologies. It is predicted that the number of mobile-payment users will increase to 340 million in 2014 with transactions to reach up to $245 billion. With more than 20 billion connected devices expected to be in use by 2020, machine-to-machine exchanges will represent $1.2 trillion in revenue for operators by 2020. Whether braving the holiday shopping crowd, paying a (dreaded) visit to the dentist, or establishing a small business, service providers will become more involved in our connected lives.

A More Connected Home Environment

In the entertainment landscape, “content is king" is a truism. A growing number of entrants, such as Microsoft, are upping their efforts to aggregate media content in one location while allowing connected devices to access and share this content.

One effect of the widespread availability of broadband is that our homes themselves are likely to be the next big “connected" entity in our lives.  Broadband service providers are uniquely equipped to deliver an exciting array of home services to consumers – enabling these services  to move from separate silos (think of your home alarm system – a separate, standalone system that’s not connected to anything else) to a range of connected services that can be accessed and controlled from a variety of properly authenticated devices. Think of the benefits of having home security, energy management, health-care monitoring and even multimedia services connected to a secure, intelligent cloud. Stay tuned, because you’ll be seeing more connected homes in the coming year.

More Options for Consumers and More Opportunities for Service Providers

By taking better advantage of the many connected devices consumers and now using, 2012 is shaping up to be quite the year – for those service providers who keep their ear to the ground, make themselves indispensable to their customers and anticipate market trends, not react to them.

I’ll leave you with two quotes. The first is “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," from the philosopher George Santayana. The second is, “You ain’t seen nothing yet." I said that.

Rebecca Prudhomme is vice president of Product & Solutions Marketing at Amdocs. She currently leads Amdocs’ entire global team of product marketing professionals focused on bringing to market Amdocs’ products, services and solutions.