In today's telco environment, data usage is accelerating, faster networks are rolling out and smart devices are becoming more ubiquitous. In parallel, customers have more choices: a choice of communications service provider (CSP), a choice of interaction method, a choice of over-the-top (OTT) services, etc. If that's not enough, customers' expectations have been raised – in part due to the "always on" Internet experience.

1. White Paper
CSPs Must Deliver Superior Customer
Experience
Prepared by
Ari Banerjee, Senior Analyst
Sarah Wallace, Analyst
Heavy Reading
www.heavyreading.com
in conjunction with
www.comverse.com
June 2013

2. Executive Summary
In today's telco environment, data usage is accelerating, faster networks are
rolling out and smart devices are becoming more ubiquitous. In parallel, customers
have more choices: a choice of communications service provider (CSP), a choice
of interaction method, a choice of over-the-top (OTT) services, etc. If that's not
enough, customers' expectations have been raised – in part due to the "always
on" Internet experience.
CSPs, which wish to both retain customers and persuade them to be advocates,
are well aware of increasing demands, but meeting those demands is easier said
than done, as they grapple with disparate, siloed legacy systems that are not
supporting the customer experience – and the business – well. When updating
systems, CSPs will have to keep in mind consistency across all lines of business and
customer channels, as well as find a way to make sense of the copious amounts of
subscriber data coming from many sources.
And while the network and service delivery in general remain important to the
customer experience, focusing only on network metrics, such as quality of service
(QoS), is not enough. Actionable analytics and intelligent policy management
can be used to deliver an overall better customer experience. Other key elements
include increased real-time handling, giving more control to the customer, and
providing personalized and enriched services. On the back end, coordination and
automation will help provide a seamless experience to the subscriber. CSPs have
no choice but to be proactive in adopting new approaches so as to be able to
provide an optimal customer experience. Otherwise, they risk losing subscribers or
alienating potential promoters.
On the upside, unlike OTT companies, CSPs have the opportunity to capture and
understand many more of the events that can affect the customer experience in
time to influence that experience for the best. Greater attention to customer
experience is also an imperative if operators are to develop two-sided business
models in which they deliver third-party services.
CSPs should look to vendors that are experienced with multiple aspects of the
customer experience – service delivery, care, marketing, billing and the like – to
help them make the transition from disparate systems to a cohesive ecosystem
with the customer at the center.
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3. Key Dimensions of Customer Experience
CSPs are looking for the next big thing to differentiate themselves from their
competitors. When every operator has similar networks and services, they can only
separate themselves from the pack by offering a superior customer experience.
The company that manages to do so can be more efficient, more proactive and
ultimately more innovative than its competitors.
The concept of customer experience management can be broken down into four
dimensions: anticipating, controlling, responding to and optimizing the customer
experience. These management activities have different timescales associated
with them, although there is a trend toward accelerating the ability to carry out
these activities from days or weeks to near real time.
Since communications services operate in real time, the impact on customer
experience is more immediate than in many other industries. The CSP that best
anticipates end-customer requirements, improves responsiveness and provides a
more personalized level of service is intelligently managing its customer's experience and should reap the benefits in terms of lower operational costs, increased
customer loyalty and higher profitability.
Figure 1 is based on a recent Heavy Reading survey of 70 unique global operators
that highlights the key activities CSPs believe are critical for providing a superior
customer experience.
Figure 1: Activities CSPs Believe Are Crucial to Deliver Superior Customer Experience
Source: Heavy Reading
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4. CSPs acknowledge that they need to understand their customers' individual
experiences in a timely manner (82 percent) and on a continuous basis as they
interact with their organizations both on- and off-net. A timely approach puts CSPs
in the best position to manage all the moving parts that can affect the customer
experience, including the network, services, subscriber devices and contact
center interactions. The ability to capture and understand the events that can
affect the customer experience in time to influence and optimize that experience
is a major source of differentiation for CSPs.
Respondents also view order fulfillment as important to customer service (81
percent), as an efficient order fallout management system ensures that order
failures are detected and corrected early for prompt provisioning of customer
service. The handling of Big Data is also viewed as important (80 percent), as CSPs
realize that they must leverage all the data they have on a subscriber in order to
provide optimal customer service.
From the subscribers' point of view, subscribers want service availability and QoS,
and they want to be able to conveniently manage their account through any
channel. Subscribers also want CSPs to recognize them as an individual, so that
the CSP can anticipate their unique needs, personalize their experience and fix
their issues even before their service experience is impacted. Figure 2 looks at key
customer experience aspects as perceived by subscribers along with their main
characteristics that will help provide superior customer experience.
Figure 2: Key Customer Experience Aspects From the Subscriber Point of View
Source: Heavy Reading
So in comparing the two points of view, CSPs seem to understand what their
customers want; now it is just a matter of getting up to speed to meet these
needs. CSPs must update their systems to meet the demands of customers, or they
will lose them to more competent competition.
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5. Experience Measurement
Heavy Reading's research in the customer experience space points to a few
gaping holes in CSP strategies. Most CSPs capture very network-centric and call
center-specific KPIs that do not paint the full picture of the end-user experience.
However, today leading operators are beginning to use Net Promoter Score (NPS)
and other more holistic metrics to measure customer experience. Figure 3 shows
the KPIs that CSPs believe are critical for them to measure customer experience.
Figure 3: Customer Experience KPIs
Source: Heavy Reading
CSPs' customer experience strategy needs to be transformative and should be
able to anticipate, contextualize and preempt customer complaints and queries
and be able to effectively address subscribers' challenges. Though most of the
customer experience metrics identified in Figure 3 are well understood, there are
some emerging underlying trends that should be further discussed:
Net Promoter Score (NPS): NPS has been gaining traction for measuring brand
loyalty and advocacy among CSPs. The concept of NPS is used to ascertain how
customers feel about the services they are receiving from a brand, in a bid to turn
potential detractors into promoters and brand advocates. From an industry
benchmark standpoint, the NPS ranking of the communications industry is much
lower than other industry verticals – clearly indicating that CSPs have a lot of work
to do to convert customers into brand advocates. NPS is becoming an important
metric for measuring customer experience by most CSPs, and many CMOs are
being measured internally with respect to their organization's NPS score.
Anticipating and responding to social channels: Social media plays a critical role
as consumers might start their research for any product on a social website and
consider their friends' suggestions on Facebook or Twitter, compare product or
services online and research further on blogs such as Yelp before actually making
buying decisions in the store. From a CSP standpoint, they need the ability to
manage their brand on the social channels and also proactively engage with
their customers by providing social listening and monitoring capabilities.
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6. Evolving Market Dynamics No Longer Allow
Customer Experience to Be Piecemeal
Let us take a look at some of the key trends that are shaping the communications
industry today and directly or indirectly influencing CSPs thinking to put focus on
the customer experience:
Mobile broadband: As mobile broadband usage continues to increase, subscribers need to have a clear awareness of how much they have used to prevent bill
shock. CSPs need to enable sophisticated management of traffic and entitlements across devices and family members and be transparent about their data
offerings and roaming, or else dissatisfied customers will become angry and churn.
Device proliferation: Subscribers today consume data services across multiple
devices. They manage their data on devices such as their tablets and laptops,
gaming devices and Internet-enabled TVs. In terms of customer experience, issues
such as QoS, billing and quota management need to be managed holistically
across multiple devices.
Personalization: Subscribers today expect offerings that are relevant for their likes
and preferences, such as video sharing, online gaming or live content streaming,
and not simply tailored around rigid bandwidth or quota levels. CSPs need to
support that and be able to create efficient customer loyalty programs that can
enable customer stickiness.
Demand for cross-channel consistency: Heavy Reading's research shows that for
most CSPs, customer interactions aren't coordinated across channels, forcing
customers to repeat themselves as they move between service/support channels
– a customer dis-satisfier for sure. In our survey, more than 70 percent of wireless
operators admitted they do not pass along customer information from one touch
point to another, and an overwhelming 82 percent of consumers reported they
had to repeat their information in a multi-touch buying process. Tomorrow's market
winners should be able to deliver a cross-channel experience that provides the
same seamless experience to customers, regardless of whether it is via the Web,
smartphone or retail kiosk.
OTT-like experience: Giant OTT players are shaping user expectations of how
services should be delivered, consumed and experienced. For example, when
subscribers are connected to the Internet, they expect to use services on any
device and network, anywhere in the world. CSPs attempting to deliver a superior
customer experience must ensure they provide their users an OTT-like experience –
by modernizing their traditional voice and messaging services. In addition, the
emergence of OTT providers has increased the pressure from marketing departments for innovative services and pricing plans. 4G service offerings such as highdefinition video, music, gaming, IP telephony, mobile TV, mobile applications and
voice over LTE (VoLTE) might help combat the OTT threat, but they also make
supporting the demands of customers more complex.
Social media: In a world where more and more customers interact and talk about
their experiences and issues online, online brand management has become big
business. CSPs that ignore what customers say about them in unstructured environments risk swift and widespread brand damage. Making sense of structured
and unstructured data to understand the mood and transaction pattern of
customers in real time is therefore critical, as is social network and sentiment
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7. analysis. This will help CSPs to take preventative actions to avoid churn or customer
dissatisfaction, by providing preemptive service assurance and using feedback
and sentiment to better understand their customers' preferences and enhance
their personalized offerings.
Even when facing the trends listed above, customer experience is still being
tackled piecemeal by individual functional groups or solutions within the CSP.
Hence, CSPs are often falling short on delivering a superior customer experience
due to the following reasons:

Lack of communications between supporting customer experience pillars
(such as the ones described in the next section). This results in the lack of
automation, which is especially crucial when trying to create efficiencies
across various domains and systems.

Inability to pull together customer insights from multiple sources such as
network and BSS elements, and to act upon them in real time.

Inability to minimize manual effort in troubleshooting or resolving issues.
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8. Pillars of a Superior Customer Experience
It is clear that all parts of the CSP's organization affect the customer experience –
from CRM-oriented interactions, such as whether a call center agent is helpful, to
infrastructure management-oriented events, such as whether a service is running
at five-nines availability, transactions on a home location register are peaking or a
cell site is reaching overload. However, it's important to identify the fundamental
pillars of superior experience delivery.
While customer care and service delivery (from the network to QoS to service
delivery engines) have always been and will remain pillars of the overall customer
experience, they will need to evolve and adapt to the emerging trends discussed
above. And, today perhaps more than ever, the charging and billing aspects of
the customer relationship drive the experience, so it is really the business support
system (BSS) – with customer care as a subset – that is a pillar.
At the same time, emerging trends demand that new solution pillars such as policy
management and analytics be made a part of the foundation.
Ranging throughout the entire ecosystem, from network to IT and business, each
of the solution pillars mentioned brings its own dimensions to the customer experience milieu.
Let us take a look at those pillars and the steps operators should take to harness
them to deliver a superior customer experience and contribute to the aforementioned characteristics of anticipation, control, responsiveness and optimization to
enhance the customer experience.
BSS Pillar
Add social elements to customer interactions: With users spending considerable
time at social networking sites, they are developing habits and expectations that
CSPs need to understand – and emulate. Many users today are more comfortable
posting a question than calling the call center. CSPs need to meet these expectations by adding social dimensions to their customer care solutions – automatically
monitoring and analyzing social interactions. Moreover, CSPs should utilize social
channels to drive more personalized campaigns, leveraging new information such
as interest groups, fan pages, devices, etc. Delivering smarter customer interactions will result in financial gain for CSPs – less churn, fewer call-center calls,
increased subscriptions, etc. – as well as indirect benefits such as NPS improvement, increased customer satisfaction and increased first-call resolution.
Ensure real-time collection, processing and evaluation of event data: Real-time
interaction and response has a bearing on every aspect of the customer experience. Since customer experience is multi-faceted, data must be gathered from
multiple sources, such as previous brand interactions, retail and e-commerce
touch points, call-center data, interactive voice response, mobile devices and
even social networks. Given the volume of factors that shape a customer's
experience and buying behavior – reading and analyzing blogs, comparing
prices, searching on different channels, etc. – the overall data set is bound to be
extremely large, and the ability to collect this data in real time is crucial.
Provide dynamic account control: To ensure customer satisfaction, CSPs need to
allow subscribers to control and adjust their offerings and entitlements. For exam-
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9. ple, subscribers approaching their usage limit should be able to choose whether
they want to temporarily upgrade their plan or pay per usage; others asking to
watch a live sports game should be able to instantly enhance their allocated
bandwidth, etc. Enabling customers to set (for themselves or their family members)
balance and usage thresholds as well as notification and alerts policies can
enhance customer satisfaction while ensuring a truly personalized experience.
Service Delivery Pillar
Beyond network QoS and service assurance, service delivery must transform to
provide the everywhere experience: As OTT players shape user expectations, CSPs
need to enable subscribers to access both traditional services such as voice and
messaging, as well as new rich communications services from anywhere in the
world using any type of device (mobile phone, tablet, PC) and network (3G, Wi-Fi,
fixed, etc.). This is essential as the world makes a phased transition to 4G/all-IP.
Modernize traditional communications services: To maintain service relevancy,
CSPs must create a user experience strong enough to keep subscribers from going
elsewhere. This can be achieved by modernizing their services with multi-device,
Web access capabilities and rich user interfaces.
Policy Management as a New Pillar
Accelerate introduction of new data offerings: In this era of growing demand for IP
services, policy management plays a pivotal role in the definition of subscribers'
overall quality of experience, enabling dynamic assignments of service entitlements as well as QoS levels. CSPs attempting to deliver most value to subscribers
will need to closely align policy solutions with charging, supporting accelerated
time to market for new offers as well as a more holistic view of the subscriber. CSPs
must leverage both network and IT information to provide the customer with the
best possible experience.
Analytics as a New Pillar
Introduce relevant, personalized plans and offerings: In a recent Heavy Reading
survey, 40 percent of consumers say that they like to receive personalized offers
from their service provider. Tools such as predictive analytics can use dynamic
profiling to analyze incoming data sources such as customer care, product/
service/device portfolios, cost and billing, and network service quality to segment
customers. Customers can be segmented by usage, interests, location, socioeconomic status, propensity to churn and influence in their network.
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10. Break Down the Silos
A unified approach to customer experience – across all foundation pillars – is the
need of the hour. It is in the best interest of CSPs to look for unified solutions, as
siloed solutions can only paint a partial picture of customer experience and result
in suboptimal results.
CSPs have traditionally operated with a complex, disparate set of silos, including
CRM, billing, inventory, provisioning and fulfillment, service management systems,
network management systems and the different generations of network architecture – each holding different types of data, in different formats and with different
business goals. This must change if a CSP is to truly deliver a superior experience.
A unified, holistic approach across all lines of business will allow for end-to-end
insight and communication with individual subscribers. For example, as operators
move forward with their interest in policy and charging, they should keep other
lines of business and parts of the back-office in mind, as it will be crucial that they
all work as a whole.
So CSPs that already have or are implementing an analytics solution should ensure
that it is closely aligned with their policy management and charging solutions. This
is an example of breaking through the silos, because an analytics-driven approach to policy management and charging will enhance customer experience
by building services, taking into account subscriber behavior and creating and
launching personalized offers to customers based on analytics.
Unification also enables automation, which is both efficient and should have a
positive effect on the customer experience. For example, with a unified system, a
CSP can run a marketing campaign that automatically pulls data from customer
and billing databases, while using analytics to define relevant target segments.
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11. Vendor Analysis – Comverse
Comverse helps CSPs enhance the customer experience by facilitating smart
customer interactions and account control; allowing rapid rollout of relevant,
personalized plans and offerings; and enabling enriched communications services
that can interoperate across devices and networks.
The breadth of the Comverse portfolio enables CSPs to tackle customer experience holistically; addressing various aspects as described in Figure 4 below.
Figure 4: Customer Experience Is Everywhere
Source: Comverse
Comverse provides telecom business enablement solutions that support service
innovation and smart monetization. A robust portfolio of products and services
helps operators transition to an all-IP world, capture a winning role in new value
chains through service and business model innovation and enhance the customer
experience. Solutions cover BSS, policy management, digital services and valueadded services.
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12. Conclusion
CSPs see customer experience as a key way of differentiating their brands in highly
competitive markets where rivals offer similar services and have the same network
capabilities. Our research has shown that customer experience management is a
journey and will always remain a work in progress. Embodying the principle of
continuous improvement, dazzling the customer will always require further evolution.
Many CSPs are linking their customer experience initiatives with business transformation activities, as they seek to become partners and enablers of their customers' "digital lives." In order to accelerate telco responsiveness to the customer
experience, decisions need to be made more quickly and cost-effectively, and,
whenever possible, automated. For example, intelligence from supporting
customer experience pillars should be able to determine how to heal a network
fault without human intervention; or what the appropriate response to a customer
experiencing difficulties should be – for example, automatically launching a
campaign or providing the right self-service guidance.
This automation requires tight integration between systems that create intelligence
and systems that support customer-related business processes – OSS/BSS, policy
control, service delivery, analytics, etc. At this stage of the market, CSPs face the
challenge of implementing the right blend of customer experience-supporting
solutions that will enable the automation of management actions.
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