By Mae Kowalke
In a market recovering from “the great recession,” where businesses and individuals are more inclined to save than spend, and have more tools than ever with which to make informed choices, communications service providers (CSPs) face steep competition.
Nothing short of a customer experience transformation is likely to help telecommunications providers end up on the shortlist, with any hope of being selected. This type of focus requires much more than “outside the box” thinking.
In a recent white paper, Customer Experience Transformation via Analytics, Alcatel-Lucent highlighted the connection between customer experience transformation and new business models, citing observations from research firm Gartner. CSPs really have three options, this argument goes, when diverging from traditional business models.
- Move into adjacent industries to become a diversified provider
- Provide platforms for delivering third-party content and applications
- Become wholesale providers of smart utilities by leveraging existing network capabilities
In the first two options, success requires a deep understanding of customer experiences and the capabilities to effectively manage those experiences. This is not merely a tactical change but a strategic one.
“Customer experience management enabled by analytics is a required asset for successful transformation,” Alcatel-Lucent noted.
As suggested by Alcatel-Lucent, real-time business analytics and business intelligence are keys to customer experience transformation.
In this context, Alcatel-Lucent defines customer analytics as “the logical analysis of data that corresponds to customers and customer behavior, as well as data that corresponds to service provider infrastructures and service delivery capabilities.” Data mining combined with analytics leads to business intelligence, defined as “ historical, current and future predictive views of business performance.”
Transforming customer experience data into actionable business intelligence requires changes to business models, along with architecture modifications.
“In many cases, interesting data that is relevant to the customer experience is locked inside proprietary network elements or systems that were not designed to expose this data,” Alcatel-Lucent noted.
The full white paper contains much more detail about these concepts, along with discussion into the impact of analytics capabilities such as reports, dashboards, analytics APIs, event stream processing, and large-scale real-time business analytics.
“It’s more important than ever for CSPs to adopt a customer centric view of their service offerings,” Alcatel-Lucent stressed. “To transform the customer experience, CSPs need to make sense of raw data, produce meaningful and actionable real-time intelligence, and take the appropriate action at every customer touch point.”
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