By Susan J. Campbell
As a customer service provider (CSP), you are in a considerably advantageous position to capture, mine and analyze data about your network and your subscribers. You have multiple touch points that provide valuable information and as you gather insights regarding your customers’ preferences, experiences and predicted behaviors, you’ll be in a much better position to transform the customer experience.
An Alcatel-Lucent white paper, Customer Experience Transformation via Analytics, explores this concept in depth, focusing on the fierce competitive environment that exists for CSPs in a dynamic market. Service providers today have to work harder than ever to keep customers happy. In fact, they have to focus on the total customer experience and not just one element.
A challenge and an opportunity exist for the CSP today. While these organizations tend to hold vast amounts of data regarding their networks and their subscribers, they aren’t effectively managing that information. Do you fall into that trap? Are you failing to leverage customer analytics that address data captured from customers, services, devices and your network?
When insights are gathered from analytics, strategic initiatives can be driven to improve retention rates and customer lifetime value. With real-time capabilities, service providers can react quickly to changing conditions and enable timely interactions with all customers – ensuring the customer experience transformation.
One implementation that could be of great value within your CSP environment is a dashboard that helps you to visualize and summarize analytics results. The dashboard and subsequent reports can be used by CSPs to detect anomalies and troubleshoot problems. It also ensures your managers can drill down to identify primary contributors to a problem, or the root cause of the problem, at any given time. The dashboard could be customized according to your environment to truly capture the relevant customer experience in an effective manner.
Customer analytics can also be effectively used by your marketing department. This data can be used to help manage customer churn and loyalty. When analytics are in place, the marketing department can better understand the customer experience from the customer’s point of view. It also provides information on subscriber spend and profitability, propensity to churn and the influence of the social group.
The behavior of your customers is definitely something you want to capture, examine and measure. While still relatively new to this market, yield management is used to influence customer behavior to maximize the sales and profitability of a perishable resource. Following the natural customer usage, you will find that some of the communication infrastructure is highly utilized in some places, while other parts of your infrastructure will remain underutilized.
To enhance the customer experience, yield management can be used to offer discounts when communications services are used during excess capacity, and to combine dynamic pricing with intelligent policy management.
Finally, personalization is a key element within any CSP environment as it can be used to differentiate and monetize offerings. Personalization allows you to understand your subscribers down to the individual level and begin to offer services that match with customer preferences, standing out from other providers in the same space.
To ensure the customer experience transformation, Alcatel-Lucent offers the Customer Experience Transformation program that combines the company’s global services expertise, leading communications products, Bell Labs analytics algorithms and best-of-breed partner solutions. With such support firmly in place, you can move from vision to execution while transforming the total experience for the customer.
