Techfast

By Erin Harrison

We won’t sugarcoat it: European telecom operators are not reaching their full market potential due to a lack of leadership and customer visibility. In fact, just 12 percent of C-suite executives are leading the customer experience agenda at major operators, according to a new survey conducted by European Communications—the results of which appear in a recent special edition, “Customer Experience.”   

Of concern, no one is leading a customer experience effort in 8 percent of operators. In a majority of cases, (41 percent) individual managers are taking it upon themselves, while for 39 percent of respondents, a dedicated customer experience manager has been put in charge.

While the findings cast a negative shadow on the customer experience focus by European service providers (SPs), the study’s results should be motivation for the SPs’ IT decision makers who want to turnaround their customer experience efforts and become more profitable.

A lack of coherent leadership naturally feeds down to a fragmented implementation of strategy. Although a majority of operators (45 percent) said customer experience is treated as an integral part of everything their organization does across all business units, that means a majority does not.