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Soon everything that can be connected will be connected — a mobile world driven by wireless communications and cloud-based services. Forecasts predicts there will be more than 50 billion connected devices by 2020, so telecom operators must now assert their position in evolving value chain.
The telecom industry, however, is unable to offer customer satisfaction to its consumers today. The result is that the consumer loyalty is getting affected badly.
Telecom operators’ revenues are under stress and the challenges which they are facing today are how to offer differentiated services, increase upselling, enhance customer intimacy and deliver their promise with increasing complexities in the network.
Not only is the problem industry-wide, but is also endemic to operators who are unable to offer differentiated services when competing amongst themselves. The following picture shows the result of survey done by Ericsson Consumer Lab:
In order to meet the needs of consumers who expect more for less, the industry has to rely on innovative business models that offer new ways of monetising services. The borders between the telecom, information technology and media industries are blurring, meaning devices, services and users are frequently moving between different sectors. To remain profitable and competitive, operators need to assess and evolve their position within the value chain. This means evolving what they offer, how they operate and the way they do business — and in turn who they partner with and what to expect from that partnership.
Managed services have evolved from a purely a cost reduction formula to bringing the right competence in the operator, improving network quality and customer satisfaction. The new model will help in deepening partnerships that link the partnership success to business outcomes and customer experience, and is about enabling business differentiations and enhancing brand values.
In this article we will focus on the “How they operate?” aspect of the above mentioned evolution. Experience-centric managed services is a new model to operate networks which will help operators to take a lead and offer differentiated services to end consumers. The experience-centric model not only encompasses the coverage and network quality, but also takes into consideration the overall customer experience towards an operator. It takes managed services further by helping them create targeted, differentiated customer experiences.
Experience-centric managed services has the ability to play a vital role in operators’ strategies by helping them to grasp new opportunities, re-evaluate their position in the market and ensure that customer expectations are met. To secure user satisfaction, operators need to deliver a level of customer experience that honestly reflects their brand promise. This is where an experience-centric business operation is key. Operators need to define the level of customer experience required to meet their business objectives, and put the necessary KPIs in place to ensure that this level is achieved. An experience-centric managed services model creates substantial business value through the right combination of technical, service and customer experience measures. What will be key in the future is having the ability to measure all the services that consumers use which provide clarity on the experience that is actually being created for them. Operators need to align the actual experience with actually what is needed. With customer experience as the central focus, a value-based relationship is created rather than one that is purely transactional. Those operators that align their key business objectives and prioritise customer experience management across their end-to-end business processes will take the leap from monitoring to managing the services they provide to their end-users.
To achieve this, it will be more than an equipment or a specific tool investment. Customer experience can be managed by creating a holistic solution around advanced tools, competent manpower and foolproof processes to enable the management of customer experience in a more effective manner. There will be a lot of analytics involved in arriving at the right output which can be utilised to enhance customer perception towards the services. There is a need to align the service KPIs with agreement between operators and OTT players and ensure uninterrupted services to the consumer.
No two operators are the same. In every project there are unique requirements that demand a unique solution. Differentiated engagement models make this possible by adjusting to the individual requirements of each customer. Some operators who are at initial phase of evolution may still choose the traditional managed services models as it offer cost efficiency, complexity shielding, access to competence and network performance management. However, operators who are at an advanced stage may go for experience-centric model managed services, which help them create targeted, differentiated customer experiences. This also creates value and business differentiation by taking a holistic approach that covers network, IT operations and applications, service development and customer care.
To accommodate an experience-centric managed services model, there must be a fundamental shift in traditional operation areas of people, culture and competence. In today’s world, technology is a multi-layered architecture. In the wake of convergence, consumer services work across an end-to-end infrastructure. As operators transform their networks, they need people with a breadth of skills who understand how services work across the spectrum, in addition to those with specialist knowledge.
It will be a journey to reach experience centric operations with partnerships linked to customer and business outcomes, which need to start now. The chosen vendor should have a broad portfolio with complementary products and solutions across the E2E customer lifecycle. Companies such as Ericsson continually invest in global set of tools, methods and processes to ensure that they remain at the leading edge, with a strong focus on automation and customer experience management.
The author is Practice Head – managed services, Ericsson India
