101 Ways of Talking About Customer Experience

By Sergio Silvestre

This year Management World Dublin was a very busy and exciting time for WeDo Technologies. Having recently worked with our partners Optimus and EDP, our utilities unit manager, Miguel Torrão Mendes, took part in two panel discussions talking about how communications service providers (CSPs) can use smart grids as a new revenue opportunity. Our team was also involved in two catalyst projects on business-assurance automation and revenue-assurance impact measurement.

For me, the event had two main high points. The first happened early in the week after a conversation with a member of the press, where he congratulated me for being the only person he had spoken to that didn’t have some kind of pitch around customer experience. To be honest, I thought he was teasing me at first. Then he gave some examples of the pitches he’d heard. My response – although this is an area that interests us, 18 months ago we decided not to be the 102nd company talking about it.

WeDo Technologies is all about control, i.e. revenue and business assurance. Controlling what customers are getting from their CSPs in order to proactively improve poor "experiences" is totally possible using our tools. For example, we have successful stories to tell about churn prediction. However we decided to wait for the topic to settle. It’s true that we observe a lot of demand-side interest for the topic but there are no clear owners, and worse, we feel there are no horizontal strategies to approach it.

We see network teams, IT teams, customer service teams, marketing teams and sales teams all looking at customer experience. The problem is, they all have different objectives and as a result are all looking at different things. Finding one tool to address all these areas is therefore quite tricky. In fact, CSPs probably already have the tools to do it. They just need to coordinate them, aligning strategies, processes and organisation. The TM Forum can help in achieving this.

The second high point may not be of interest to most of you, but trust me, it should be! It has to do with Twitter, a microblogging platform that a great deal of people around BSS/OSS still ignore.

Management World Dublin generated good content around the hashtag #MWD12. For those that did not have the chance to attend it's a great and easy way to know the "what," "why" but most importantly – and this is why I really recommend Twitter – the "who." Who are the faces behind the brands and companies getting the work done? And more than that, who is having fun while doing it?

Many of you will be asking: “Why is this different from Linkedin?" Well, on Linkedin you typically only "connect" with people that you know. On Twitter you get to follow people you would enjoy meeting because they talk about the topics you feel are important. And when you meet, it's almost as if you already knew that person. Want to know more about this? Just tweet me @sergiosilvestre.

Sergio Silvestre is chief marketing officer for WeDo Technologies.