In today’s Experience Economy, value is defined by experience. Customers make their purchases based on the positive engagements they expect to have with a brand and how that brand chooses to interact with its customers. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) have been slow to embrace the Experience Economy, in part due to the fact that they have historically been so focused on their network infrastructure for coverage, capacity and resilience as opposed to optimising their customer engagement. This has often resulted in low Net Promotor Scores for CSPs and the need for greater investments in the overall customer experience.The Coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated customers’ digital behaviours with a measurable effect on how customers are choosing to buy and interact with retailers. In many countries, the pandemic has forced consumers to engage solely through digital platforms with the majority of their retailers. As a result, the mindset of customers has been shifting more rapidly, with significant proportions of consumers preferring to continue to use digital channels for buying and service and stating that retail stores will not be missed. Many of these trends were already underway but Coronavirus has fast-tracked this trajectory.
We are well past the time for taking a piecemeal approach to adding digital capabilities. To succeed in today’s digital-first environment and deliver intelligent, personalized digital experiences CSPs must take a holistic, data-driven approach. This requires understanding and transforming the full customer journey and the key interconnections between experiences. Let’s explore the challenges and opportunities in this lifecycle.
Acquisition
Acquiring new customers and continuing to propose relevant offers throughout their lifecycle is vital to a CSP’s business. Too often today, CSPs are limited by the inability to personalize those offers which results in poor conversation and high cost of acquisition. Instead, CSPs can unify zero, 1
st, 2
nd and 3
rd party data and apply AI to predict needs and deliver highly personalized, relevant offers that will appeal to their target customers.
2. Buying
Customers expect to be able to purchase anything, anywhere, anytime using the channel of their choice. They want to be able to continue their buying journey seamlessly when switching channels rather than having to start again. By implementing a unified sales catalog and persistent shopping cart, CSPs can provide a frictionless buying experience and improve cart conversions. Additionally, CSPs can enable service agents to proactively offer relevant personalized offers and promotions to customers through the harmonization of commerce processes with care. This will increase offer uptake as well as cross- and up-sell rates.
Care
As consumers ourselves, we have all felt the frustration of poor care experiences and understand how that impacts our overall satisfaction. We naturally dislike spending significant amounts of time trying to resolve issues, being transferred from one agent to the next and re-explaining the problem each time. To address this, CSPs must provide agents with the relevant customer data and tools like natural language processing so they can quickly address issues – and in the process build the rapport to propose personalized additional offers that could be valuable to the customer. Additionally, to meet the expectations of the digital-first mindset, CSPs must provide intuitive unassisted care capabilities. Together these improvements can drive much greater satisfaction and dramatically lower cost of service.
Launch
For many CSPs, the process of creating new offers and launching them to market is painstakingly slow and manual, typically in spreadsheets or using home-grown apps. This means that creative new products – especially those coming in the 5G era – can’t be brought to market quickly and CSPs are outpaced by competitors. CSPs can overcome this and gain insights into how offers are performing by implementing a comprehensive launch experience with a centralized 360 view of all offers and their lifecycle stage. One-click automated publishing of offers to catalogs such as sales, commerce, billing, and provisioning dramatically decreases the time to launch new offers and generate revenue from market opportunities, while reducing management costs.
Fulfilment
Accurate and timely order fulfillment is an elementary requirement for today’s digital customers. Many CSPs today suffer from disjointed and poorly designed fulfilment systems which results in the headache of managing multiple unique fulfilment processes, reduced accuracy and increased operational costs. Instead, CSPs who utilize a model-driven, automated fulfilment solution that’s integrated with billing, care and ERP allows them to avoid the need for any error-prone manual intervention while easily handling exceptions, cancelations and in-flight revisions. This improves order visibility and lowers costs.
Monetization
Many CSPs today face limitations across their business that can be traced to their monetization system. These problems arise either because they are running many billing systems and lack a single unified view of consumption across all services, or because they lack the capability to implement creative pricing models. Success in the 5G world requires real time charging of any type of plan, including cross-product discounting, time-based discounting, tiering, and bundling to monetize the next generation of services. From the customers’ perspective, billing issues and adjustment requests represent the most frequent care related interactions with the CSP. By surfacing billing data into assisted and self-care, efficiency and customer satisfaction will improve.
Oracle addresses these challenges directly through its
Digital Experience for Communications (DX4C) offering (Figure 1).
Figure 1 – Oracle Digital Experience for Communications
Oracle’s DX4C brings CSPs a new paradigm for the Experience Economy. DX4C is an end to end, front to back office integrated solution specifically designed for the communications industry to enable smart and innovative digital engagements empowering both CSPs and their customers. Designed in alignment with the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture, DX4C builds on Oracle’s track record of providing full concept-to-cash-to-care solutions for hundreds of service providers worldwide. It is an intelligent data-driven offering that enables CSPs to provide intuitive, personalised digital experiences to innovate, engage and transform.Watch this video and read this eBook to learn more.To learn more, contact Oracle Communications.Oracle is a silver sponsor of the Digital Transformation World Series. While we can’t meet physically, we’ve reimagined everything you know and love about Digital Transformation World and turned it into a six-week digital event. The Series will offer a varied and engaging content program that will enable our global membership to connect, learn and collaborate, supporting all time zones. Don't miss out on the festival of collaboration!
Register today. Note: Communication service providers: you can
claim your free pass here.