By Susan Campbell

How would you measure the experience for the customer? Are they succeeding with their smartphone use and successfully accessing all the applications and services that you offer? Do you provide everything they need to meet their multimedia needs? Is your support staff equipped to resolve all of their issues? If you can’t positively answer these questions, it may be time to take a closer look at the way you do business and the improvements you can make for your smartphone users.

Alcatel-Lucent explored this issue in their publication: Supercharging the Customer Experience for Smartphone Success, highlighting how you can develop a broader focus in order to be successful in transforming the customer experience. And, while smartphones are dominating the mobile market, this is putting increased pressure on you to differentiate your smartphone services.

The key question to ask is how you can clearly define the customer experience and why you should care about it. According to the TM Forum, the customer experience is the result of the sum of observations, perceptions, thoughts and feelings that arise from interactions and relationships between service providers and their customers. It is suggested that every point of contact is a building block for the wireless customer experience.

This demands a Customer Experience Transformation as profitability is directly linked to providing an experience for the customer that is both attractive and valuable. This perception overall is increasingly difficult to sustain, especially among the smartphone user base. These individuals expect their devices to deliver on demand access to a full range of multimedia services and when the experience falls short of their expectations, frustration arises and mobile operators are held accountable.

The CXT Program, otherwise known as the Customer Experience Transformation program, that must be put in place ensures that you can achieve the all-encompassing goal of delivering optimal satisfaction for your customer base. You may want to progressively combine the strengths of your individual departments, systems and infrastructures, or make better collective use of customer data and personnel.

Focused Customer Experience Management helps you to trigger the transformation. This transformation begins with your technical support. Smartphones are increasingly complex and as they become more popular, more users are becoming frustrated with functions or capabilities they don’t understand. And, of course, they expect that your technical support staff should be able to answer their questions. If your staff is not equipped to solve their problems, your average handling time increases, your first call resolutions decline and your customer churn grows.

If you can equip your customer support team to address customer issues in a timely manner that not only solves their problems, but also satisfies their needs, you are much more likely to build a loyal customer base as you are building a unique experience for your customers. This experience is measured from the answered call to the complete resolution, so place your focus on the entire process. When you create a satisfying experience for your customers, they will stay with you and continue to generate revenue.