Four Ways Cable Operators Can Boost the Customer Experience

Next Generation Communications Blog

Four Ways Cable Operators Can Boost the Customer Experience

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

The customer experience has always mattered, but its importance has grown in recent years. This has been driven by increased global competition, including the almost instant availability of alternations, and the rising expectations by fickle and informed consumer. Yet, cable operators have a long way to travel if they want to deliver the customer experience (CX) that consumers demand.

The Temkin Group’s Q3 2014 survey of 10,000 US consumers’ opinions about goods and services registered the lowest ranking average Net Promoter Score (NPS) for pay TV providers, a telling statistic. Internet service providers did almost as poorly, coming in only one position higher.

“As technology innovations drive shifts in consumer behavior and open new service opportunities, operators must start eliminating pain points,” stressed Alcatel-Lucent’s Nicholas Cadwgan in a recent TechZine article, Cable MSOs transform the customer experience. “This includes any obstacles that will impede their ability to launch and provide adequate care and quality assurance for those services.”

Cadwgan lays out four customer experience management (CEM) areas that cable operators should focus on.

1. Cable operators need a way to bring full-fledged device management into the new service domain if they are serious about CX.

“This means operators must have comprehensive control of and visibility into every device and every service delivered to those devices from their networks,” he noted.

2. Basic customer service has to be improved, including help desks, interactive voice response (IVR) systems, and self-help portals.

“To provide CSRs all the information they need to reduce resolution time, the new CEM platform must have powerful analytics capabilities in conjunction with data-gathering that reaches across all devices and systems,” suggested Cadwgan.

3. Marketing strategies must be accelerated. Marketing personnel, for example, must quickly activate new tiers, usage-based pricing and packaging models, free trial and reduced-price incentives, and value-added applications.

4. Cable operators need to work on integrated multi-service management capabilities such as allowing engineering departments to immediately gauge how new technology strategies are impacting service performance in all locations on all devices.


Analytics systems need to be able to track and identify issues based on information relevant to whatever access link a particular user is on, and the operator’s CX system must be able to aggregate and present all relevant information from a user-centric viewpoint.

The customer experience matters, and cable operators better start taking it seriously if CX statistics are to be believed.

For more of Cadwgan’s thought about opportunities transformation can afford cable operators you are invited to listen to the following podcast on the subject.  

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Listen here.





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