Elevating 'Customer-Centricity' Beyond Buzzword Status

By Shira Levine, Infonetics Research

A few weeks ago, my esteemed colleague Tara Seals blogged about the industry buzzword that threatens to out-buzz the frenzy around IMS a few years ago — the term “customer-centricity.” The phrase has been included in just about every PowerPoint created in the telecom industry over the past year or so, yet as Tara astutely points out, no one really knows what customer centricity actually means. Let’s face it, the term “customer centricity” is about as cloudy as … well … cloud computing.

I can’t shed a whole lot of light on the issue — nor can anyone, for that matter. Unlike IMS, customer centricity doesn’t involve any standards. There may be some best practices that operators can adopt, particularly from other industries such as retail or hospitality, but customer centricity (and the equally buzzy phrase “customer experience management”) are highly subjective terms that can be, and have been, used to push solutions ranging from customer relationship management to service assurance to subscriber analytics. One operator’s view of customer centricity may not make sense to another, given limiting factors such as regulatory environments, attitudes toward privacy and the competitive environment.

However, it seems to me that one fairly universal component of a customer-centric strategy involves creating a centralized approach to how you treat the customer. One of the up-and-coming buzzwords for 2011 seems to be the phrase “supermarket model,” referring to an environment in which the operator acts as a distributor for not just basic voice and data services, but also value-added content and applications such as digital media, mobile advertising and mobile commerce. Apple represents one of the most successful supermarket models, offering its customers a full range of devices and applications and ensuring a consistent customer experience across that range. If you go into your local Apple Store to have your iPhone repaired, you will go through the same process as you would to have your MacBook or your iPad serviced.

Compare that to the telecom industry, which still tends to have trouble identifying its customers across multiple services, let alone treating them consistently. A subscriber may have wireline voice, broadband data and wireless services from a single provider, but if each service maintains a separate representation of the customer, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, for the operator to treat the subscriber consistently across all services. As a result, customers often lack a single channel for communicating with the operator across all of their services, and the operator is limited in revenue-generating opportunities, such as cross-selling and up-selling.

Bringing Policy and SDM Into the Picture

That’s where policy control and subscriber data management (SDM) come in — buzz-worthy terms themselves that are increasingly making it into PowerPoint presentations and conference agendas. Policy servers historically have been highly network-focused, used primarily to manage broadband traffic; however, when combined with subscriber data, they become critical tools that enable operators to offer their subscribers and prospects more creative and targeted services that are consistent across multiple delivery mechanisms and end-user devices.

A few examples:

• A subscriber begins watching a piece of over-the-top content on his laptop at home, but pauses it halfway through in order to commute to work. By using policy control for authentication and authorization, coupled with subscriber data management to confirm device information and digital rights, the operator can enable that subscriber to pick up where he left off and continue watching the content on his smartphone or other handheld device on his way into work.
• An operator in a high-churn region can use subscriber behavior as a basis for establishing loyalty “rewards” for high-value customers, such as five free SMSs each time the subscriber hits a threshold for premium content downloads.
• An operator can reward a high-value subscriber with superior quality of service during peak usage hours or for a specific event.
• A customer is able to sign up for a data plan that allows him to share data usage across his multiple devices or perhaps “borrow” from a friend or family member’s data cap in months where his own data usage is particularly high.

All of the above scenarios are technically possible, given the relative maturity of the policy and SDM solutions that are commercially available. The fact that only a handful of operators are actually taking advantage of these capabilities can be attributed to a far more pervasive challenge: service provider mindset. A customer-centric strategy demands that operators open up their existing data silos and share information across internal organizations. It requires the network departments that have traditionally made policy management purchasing and deployment decisions to cooperate with IT and marketing departments that want to harness those solutions to create innovative new services. And it necessitates the operator making a top-down commitment to this new strategy, complete with a C-level mandate. Until all that occurs, “customer centricity” is unlikely to make the leap from slideware to reality.

Shira Levine is directing analyst for Next Gen OSS and Policy at telecom market research firm Infonetics Research.