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July 25, 2007

Customer Centric Strategy to Business Process Redesign

Telcos are reinventing themselves to become more customer-centric rather than being product or service centric organizations. One of the significant challenge in this transformation  is to build deeper customer relationship and longer lasting loyalty, meaning the customer stays longer, buys more, recommends the service provider to others and is more willing to pay a premium.

In order to achieve this desired differentiation and develop customer experience leadership, telcos must revisit their customer business process strategy through various phases of acquisition, retention and cross/up-sell. Telcos must adopt sound discipline around business process management and look at various business processes that interact with the customer and process attributes that impact the end customer experience.

The impact to the end customer experience can be defined by analyzing following four process attributes

  1. Usability
  2. Timeliness
  3. Completeness
  4. Adaptability

Usability stresses on the user friendliness of the process. This goes on to analyze user experience design and minimizing number of interfaces to get to the relevant information. Timeliness is dictated by customer needs. Too early or too late has adverse impact on customer experience. Completeness requires the solution to be complete and fit for the purpose and customer. Adaptability means that processes must be repeatable yet flexible to accommodate unexpected events.

Business process management has been around for a long time but largely confined to the engineering world and more focussed on improving operational cost efficiencies.  There is a need for a fresh approach to process redesign with focus on prioritizing key customer impacting business processes and improving customer experience attributes for these processes. Such process analysis should also be supplemented by identifying the intended customer behaviour across various customer micro segments and touch-points. Having a consistent process base yet differentiated for customer segments will propel Telco’s operational agility to the next level and improve business performance by attracting and retaining most profitable customers.

July 24, 2007

Customer centricity

One of the most popular business concepts today is customer-centricity. It an essential ingredient for success of any corporate today. Corporates and marketing teams who do not understand its importance will not be able to create positive customer experience and deliver value beyond customer expectation. They will lack the advantage of blending customer intelligence and insights into their services and products recipies.

Hence to stay ahead and be sucessful It is imperative for all B2B business to embrace this framework and mould their strategies accordingly.

Let me introduce to you Ankur Bhan who will share with his thoughts on 'Customer Centric Strategy to Business Process Redesign'. Ankur Bhan is a Principal with the CSP Solutions Consulting group of Infosys Technologies Limited. Ankur is a Solutions Consultant responsible for sales and marketing of Infosys solutions offerings around business process design and customer experience management for telecom service providers. Ankur is a Telecom specialist and advises clients on customer and revenue growth strategies, systems and process evolution and operational efficiencies. Recent projects include Billing operations effectiveness assessment and strategy development for a Tier 1 service provider in Europe, leading a team of consultants for BSS transformation program, and designing comprehensive business planning processes for IP and data network operations.