Customer Experience Leadership through transformed Customer Service Operations
Customer experience leadership is the next battlefield for communications service providers (CSP) considering converged services. To be successful, organizations must integrate knowledge scattered among disparate functional and operational units and deliver best-in-class customer support for converged IP-based services. CSPs must also introduce proactive and predictive capabilities for customer experience differentiation.
Improving customer experience is now a board-level agenda for many communications service providers (CSP). Information management plays a key part in managing end-customer experience for CSPs. The importance of information management is being felt with the increased amount of information required to deliver best-in-class customer support for complex IP-based products. The current operational model may not be sufficient to manage new IP-based services and may result in inflated costs and an ordinary customer experience. This is counter-productive to the initial objectives of improved customer experience, sustained profitability and increased differentiation that CSPs had set while rolling out these products.
Often, service providers consider IT tools to be the solution to the service assurance challenges posed by the IP based world. In my view, IT plays an auxiliary role in improving customer experience; the real shift lies in successful transformation across the entire value chain of the customer service organization that puts knowledge integration at the heart of its future operations.
While the current operational model is sufficient for traditional services, it may be inadequate to manage customer service organizations for converged services. Converged services require operational units that can handle complexities arising out of inter-working among diverse networks, applications, and multiple access domains. Currently, operational units are often separated by product silos, and thus, may not be able to efficiently manage operations of converged services. Further, there may be non-adjacency among functional areas such as Customer Management, Service Management and Network Operations, resulting in gaps in knowledge integration. As a result, many of today’s customer services organizations have become messengers of faults, adding unwanted delay to the resolution cycle time, while second/third line organizations with high cost resources add inordinate expense.
In my next post, I will talk more about the importance of knowledge integration initiatives that CSPs should adopt, on top of any knowledge management processes they have in place today.
