Churn can be a costly problem for service providers, particularly when it gets up into the high double-digit percentages. And that’s exactly what can happen when customers are less than satisfied with their communications services. In fact, it has been estimated that churn is 89 percent for subscribers who have a poor customer experience.
But there is an answer.
As highlighted in a recent TechZine article by Alan Marks, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions, Alcatel-Lucent, service providers can leverage analytics solutions to help them identify and track network resources, and customer behavior and experience on the network. This enables them to have visibility into whether customers are receiving the level of service for which they have subscribed.
As Marks explains, having such visibility helps service providers build customer loyalty. This has direct impact obviously on obtaining a reasonable return on investment (ROI) on those customers over time.
Plus, it better positions the service provider to upsell those subscribers in the future. It allows service providers to avoid customer care and new customer acquisition costs. And, of course, it results in happier customers, which is a positive all around.
The connected home is one application for which customer experience management tools that do analytics makes perfect sense. This arena is a relatively new one for service providers like the cable TV companies and telephone companies, which traditionally have liked to keep outside demarcation points at residential customer premises. But the connected home is now increasingly inviting service providers into consumer homes. This is great because it can enable those service providers to play a bigger role in the customer experience. It also creates challenges, however, because there are more moving parts that service providers need to consider when assessing the total customer experience.
New tools from such as Alcatel-Lucent Motive Customer Experience Solutions give service providers visibility into what’s happening with home device connectivity, Internet security and malware protection, online video quality of experience, and usage and performance. This information can be analyzed so service providers can make changes to their networks to improve the customer experience and to improve internal customer care processes.
As Marks details, the Motive CX analytics framework for optimizing the customer experience in the connected home is broken down into four categories:
Home device and home network analytics—enables operators to collect device and home network data, and use the resulting intelligence to proactively discover, diagnose, and resolve issues
Online video analytics—combines data from video player plug-ins, content delivery networks (CDNs) and quality of experience (QoE) agents to measure subscriber QoE, and assess viewing trends, content usage, and CDN performance
Security analytics—helps to establish and maintain a safe home network environment by providing network-based analysis of Internet traffic for malware and protecting the network and subscribers
Care analytics—leverages the wealth of intelligence embedded within customer care sessions and their associated workflow steps to create more efficient customer care processes.
Source: Alcatel-Lucent, TechZine blog, Analytics can customize the connected home
As depicted above, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Customer Experience Solutions portfolio includes solutions and consulting services that address different, critical touch points in the relationship between communications service providers and their customers. Among the offerings in the portfolio are Motive ServiceView (available in both Home and Mobile versions), which enables the visibility discussed earlier; Motive Big Network Analytics, which service providers can leverage to capture and extract intelligence from the network and combine it with key customer data; and many other solutions.
