Effectively Monitoring Customer Experiences

Customer Experience Management  is one of the hottest items in telecoms today where there are solutions popping up everywhere evangelizing that theirs is the best CEM solution around. Is there a single product out there that can truly claim a complete CEM solution? Looking at various solutions they can be grouped in 5 categories

• Sales focused solutions. This are sales point and web content solutions that are geared towards improving customers experiences while buying products and services. Such solution includes WebCRM, SAP, TeaLeaf, SugarCRM, Connectiva and others

• Social listening solutions. This includes web crawlers and text based analysis solutions that mine social network for conversations such as Respontek, Opentext, Satmetrix, Oracle and others

• Human agent based solutions that captures customers experiences while interacting with customer care agents such as the ones provided by Amdocs, Avaya, Zendesk, Pega, Marketforce and other similar solutions

• Network based solutions such as interfaced probes, DPIs and network traces where there are several providers of such solution including system vendors like NSN and Huawei

• Device based solutions that captures actual experiences, usage, behavior and interaction that customers have in using their devices when accessing services. Such solutions are provided by DingLi and other companies such as Carrier IQ

To fully monitor and measure customer experiences it must be done on all touch points from customers perception of a particular brand to the products and services they desired to buy to their interaction with customer service representatives and to their actual experiences in using such products and services.

Customer Experience Touch Points

All this touch points enable service providers and operators to determine how customers perceived your brand, it helps in determining what products and services are desired by consumers and which ones will they actually buy and use. Most important of touch point is knowing how satisfied consumers are on the products purchased and services used, including what phone applications they used. In terms of applications it is good to know how OTT applications or WiFi usage affect revenue generation and  profitability but most importantly how can service providers adapt to the age of AppEconomy. Social networks is of course a very important touch point nowadays especially what customers talk about you as a service providers and what they tell their friends.

Product of good customer experience in the AppEconomy age

In this day and age a good customer experience translate to happy customer and consequently loyal customer. With loyal customers any company can enjoy and reap the rewards of high profit margins, almost no churn and ever growing customer base…. Want a proof? Think Apple… as a shining example.

Customer happiness of course starts from good products and services that customer wants, desires and actually use. Remember how the iPod change the music industry forever, or how the iPhone have changed the way we use our phones and more importantly how it changed our lifestyle all together.

Most customers today, even the ones that hardly spend a cent for mobile services are very demanding. If they ever need to contact customer support they do not want to wait long for issues to be resolved, more importantly they actually do not want to experience any issues either from the services they get using the mobile network nor from their own devices. Customers are  kings and queens, they want to be pampered, treated like royalty and get the best of everything. Just imagine if customers issues can be resolved without any of them complaining, or that they can simply press a button to notify customer support of their issues with the confidence that it can be solved in no time.

A good Customer Experience Management (CEM) solution facilitates for better delivery of services and enhancement of services where they are needed and when they are needed. It helps ensure optimum performance of both network and services delivered to consumers. More importantly a good CEM solution helps service providers adapt to the new AppEconomy age, to ensure that services are delivered and at the same time assure shareholder value.

Are you ready for changing customer behavior?

With the  very fast uptake of OTT (Over The Top) applications and services such as Whatsapp, Viber, etc we have noticed from various CEM deployments globally that mobile phone user's behavior has changed dramatically. Its no longer just being mobile, no longer just being able to access the internet anywhere but more importantly being able to do all those at no cost. At no cost meaning the use of OTT applications that are easily available and used by subscribers when it is free to do so. Mobile phone users, especially in this economy are very cost conscious, they will wait to make phone calls until they are in a free network (e.g. WiFi) and use OTT application such as Whatsapp or Viber, an observation from more than 60 countries.

Some of this behavior are known to some operators, most are not aware of it and some have not even touched the tip of the ice berg.  Those who do know can align their strategies to ensure profitability and customer satisfaction at the same time. Having said that customer behavior varies from country to country, from network to network and its all up to the service providers to find out how their subscriber behaves, their preferences and usage. Finding out actual customer behavior from their devices is just the beginning, the challenge is would a service provider, big or small, adapt their services to this age of app economy….