Top Customer Experience Management Challenges in Telecoms

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Chris Keogh
Chris Keogh
10/06/2015

Telecoms network

In his first article for CX Network, Chris Keogh, Head of Client Service Management at eir Business, delved into the key to delivering an effective customer experience in the telecoms industry. Today, he goes one step further by exploring the challenges that customer experience management leaders face when developing a customer experience strategy and how they can tackle them.

For telecoms providers, Customer Experience Management (CEM) takes into consideration aspects of service quality management, service level agreement monitoring, service monitoring, fault management, and performance management and network planning. There needs to be financial and cultural investment in service management if it is to increase profitability and build brand value through enhanced customer experience.

Telecom customer experience management

The telecoms industry is looking to focus on customer experience to overcome price competition and add more value to its services. The customer requires services that enhance the utility of their networking infrastructures and expect their service providers to deliver solutions that reach well beyond the traditional boundaries of traditional network providers.

The competitor landscape in these segments is extensive and includes traditional networking companies, but also collaborators – such as Avaya, Cisco, F5, Fortinet – and even systems integrators like IBM or HP, with new entrants such as Google, Amazon & Skype, Apple, WhatsApp and Wireless operators.

SEE ALSO: Market Report: How to Capitalise on the Digital Disruption Impacting Customer Experience

 

A New Age of Challenges


Network convergence offers convenience and flexibility. As network convergence evolves, major challenges confront network support. Demand for bandwidth increases as applications become more sophisticated and users exchange data of increasingly rich content; network resources can become overwhelmed.

The Internet of Everything ecosystem is complex and involves many participants, from communications, electric/gas, healthcare, automotive, security and other industries using connected devices with sensors, modules and SIMs to provide new solutions and services. There will be all kinds of different devices, various connectivity environments, M2M enablement platforms and industry-specific M2M solutions involved. This means more devices, transactions, services, applications and connections.

These technology drivers bring the need for standards that ensure seamless operation across a multi-channel environment. There will be new types of traffic and information that place previously unknown demands on network hardware, operating systems, and software and support resources. This will drive the need for a new service support platform that will allow for information interconnection and sharing between different systems across these complex networks provisioned into a Unified Service View for the organisation and customer.

Most telecoms organisations have assets in terms of a network operations centre, but this data is across multiple silos. Customer, product and other information reside in CRM software, ERP systems, MDM applications, legacy systems, shadow systems and probably a few more data siloes, including destinations outside the core organisation. Integrating this data is a technical challenge.

Too simplistic a view of CEM can lead to its failure by having investments that makes no impact on a positive CEM experience. It can deliver a portal without a unified view of the customer information and their interactions with the organisation. It will create poor insight and analysis due to there being no collaboration of the wealth of data that exist in current silos. It allows a continued focus on product stacks rather that business service level customer engagement. All this leads to a poor first contact resolution of customer issues and queries.


Invest in a CEM Culture


These challenges can be overcome by an investment in an organisation culture that drives CEM through its people, process and systems. The Integration of the silos of information will allow analysis of service, customer or network information to drive better and consistent customer insight. This will also allow clear and concise customer data to front line service agents to drive a more rapid response to queries.

By ensuring investment in business tools you can deliver a proactive and predictive service engagement along all the components of a customer’s service solution. This helps take the first steps towards a positive CEM implementation which is complex and never simple.


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