Supercharged customer care needs proactivity

Communications service providers (CSPs) are bombarded with hype about blockchain, autonomous cars and augmented reality, but before any of the new technologies can deliver value, operators must master the fundamentals of proactive customer service. In a recent webinar, Tim McElligottt, Senior Analyst, TM Forum, and Aps Chikhalikar, Chief Innovation Officer – Asia-Pacific-Japan, ServiceNow, discussed how productivity and customer experience go hand in hand.

The customer approach – then and now

The concept of customer experience has been around for more than 20 years. Early on it was an ill-defined term that was too nebulous for those in hands-on operations roles. “It was just too new age and delicate for most of them,” explains McElligott. The poor definition resulted in poorly-executed approaches. McElligott notes, for example, a 2002 study by MIT Sloan School of Management which reported that companies were acting as if managing the experience meant providing entertainment or being engagingly creative. They equated it to restaurants that put photographs of movie stars on the walls or hung motorcycles from the ceilings. “That doesn’t really provide experience – it might provide a little tacky ambience, but it’s the food and the price and the service that creates the experience,” McElligott says. The same applies to telecom. “The concept of customer experience is far more solid now, and there are mounds of data that allow companies to measure the experience,” he says. “It still comes down to execution on the fundamentals of service and the execution on all the touch points with the customer.” Consider the points below from a TM Forum report Want to drive business benefits? Improve customer experience:

When a new customer comes along, McElligott says, they’re like a blank slate. CSPs must get all the contact elements (touch points) right the first time, every time – everything from advertising and call center response to fulfillment, service delivery, performance and even charging. They all affect the company’s reputation. But we can't always focus on those negative stats. You can also think about the fact that:

Seamless customer experience

Chikhalikar homed in on why companies should leverage customer service as a platform to improve the productivity of their organizations, drawing heavily on his work and experience at ServiceNow, which provides a cloud-based platform for digital workflows. He says that seamless customer experience and reliable and predictable assurance are intrinsically linked. “Customer experience is almost like an iceberg,” he says. “What you see on top of the water is basically 10% of what customer experience is, but it’s where 90% of the effort goes right now in terms of developing the UI [user interface], the UX [user experience], the channel of delivery. The complexity lies under the surface where you need to have the right integrations that will actually drive the outcomes that the customers are after.” So, that top 10% is the interaction channels customers see and experience, the points of contact, and a provider can push a customer to adopt a channel, but if the customer asks a question through the channel and doesn't get the required answer, they can get pushed through the channel, or to another channel, and this ends up being a negative experience for the customer. Chikhalikar explains that to enhance this experience, companies should focus on the front end: the mobile experience, the service portal, the chatbot, the virtual agent, etc. And, even more time must be spent focusing on integration across the ecosystem of platforms, so that the customer gets the right and necessary information upon engagement. “I think when you do all of the above right,” he says, “it leads to the agility to deliver new products and services faster, which invariably leads to an improved customer satisfaction score. And by driving that automation, it also leads to improved productivity and reduced operational costs.”

Where to start, what to prioritize

So amid all the information and advice regarding keeping customer happy, what do CSPs Digital or bust: Chikhalikar refers to a McKinsey study that found customers’ preferred channel of engagement with their telecom operators was digital engagement, which enjoy customer satisfaction scores much higher than traditional channels, such as phone or email (see graphics below). “That is one of the reasons why we’re seeing a lot of our customers driving that digital transformation,” he says. Revamp the technology stack: Make sure there is an ecosystem of platforms that work well together. “The reality is, today, there are multiple technology stacks that sit within customer ecosystem,” Chikhalikar explains, “so there will be a whole stack that looks after its services, another stack that's focused on analytics and reporting, another stack that's purely focused on all of the OSS [operations support systems] - core network telco components, CRM workforce management etc. “Integration across some of these legacy products is quite challenging. However, there's a recognition that as we move on to the more software defined product sets that will be coming out in the telco world, and 5g, a lot of this needs to be seamless and automated across the lifecycle for the customer.” Find adjacent revenue streams: Look at the customer, their requirements and work backward to build the product instead of using the traditional telecom delivery model would of ‘build it and they will come’. “We're seeing some of our customers or their end users starting to ask these questions…in the B2B space,” Chikhalikar says. “If you’re a healthcare provider, what are the solutions that you want to see from your communications services provider and then build around that, which would include multiple products bundled into one offering.” Leverage standardized requirements to enable agility and interoperability: Chikhalikar explains that many of the company’s top tier customers want to develop and deliver modern agile networks with software defined networking and network function virtualization. TM Forum’s standarized Open APIs make it possible for application programs across these companies to interact with each other and share data, removing the complexities from interoperability, while enabling agility and harmonious partnerships, which subsequently helps them to rapidly innovate, build, test and deploy. “The Open API framework gives a lot of the industry operators the ability to be a bit more flexible and to automate the way networks have traditionally been managed. But it also gives them the opportunity to drive new sources of revenue within the core network.” Watch the full webinar Driving productivity and the customer experience with proactive customer service management for more insights, first-hand case studies and best practices for transforming the customer experience.