By Erin Harrison
In today’s highly competitive mobile broadband market, it’s all about the customer. We all know that poor customer service not only gives a company a bad rap, but it ultimately eats away from their bottom line.
To keep customers on board and generate long-term success, service providers need to put more focus on the overall customer experience, according to the experts at Alcatel-Lucent. For many service providers, they say, the new path to profitability is a “holistic” approach focused on anticipating customers’ needs and improving their quality of experience (QoE).
The proof of this, of course, can be found in many industry surveys and research. In a September 2010 report, the TeleManagement Forum argued that “[service providers] must shun the one-size-fits-all, altruistic approach of the past, and view improvements in customer experience as a profitable business strategy.
Another example of the significant opportunity in customer experience management can be found in this statistic: Surveys by the Strativity Group show that 70 percent of consumers are willing to spend more with businesses that exceed their expectations.
With their unique customer, device and network information, service providers have the basic tools they need to enhance their broadband service offerings. To succeed with broadband customers, however, they need solutions that will enable them to use these tools to simplify and improve the customer experience. As the most common source of service provider: Customer interaction and technical support can be the trigger point for meaningful customer experience transformation.
According to Yankee Group, 87 percent of customer support calls for smartphones took more than 10 minutes and 29 percent of smartphone users state that their issue could not be resolved for several days. These numbers show significant room for improvement.
Service providers can use their customer care operations as a basis for developing more positive and beneficial relationships with customers. In order to differentiate themselves in a world of smartphones, tablets and other smart devices, service providers need call center agents who are “empowered to give customers quick and relevant answers through a variety of support channels,” according to an article from Alcatel-Lucent.
With more advanced – and better quality – technical support, service providers can begin to build a better customer experience that will ultimately boost the bottom line.
