These phrases are nothing new to most of us. However, the communications industry to date has paid little but lip service to these concepts. But it’s a new world, and in this uber-competitive environment where the traditional service provider is increasingly only one of many parts of a long and extremely complex value chain of digital services, everyone needs to wake up to the opportunity that surrounds excellence in customer experience.
If you step back and ask, “what are the fundamental competencies of the successful service provider of the future?” you end up with a fairly straightforward list: a company that can offer secure, highly available and reliable services across complex multi-party value chains; has deep knowledge through data analytics of its customers’ behavior and know what customers are going to do before the customer does; and is really good at knitting together partnerships across the various players in the value chain to bring services to market rapidly.
But right at the top of the list of competencies of the successful service provider is excellence in customer experience -- both to the direct customer of the provider, and increasingly in managing customer experience across a complex value chain, regardless of which party ends up delivering the final service to the end customer.
As defined by TM Forum, customer experience is the sum of all of the touch points between provider and customer. So it’s not just about delivering a service on time, or about excellence in customer care, or excellence in the fulfillment of new services, or excellence in the branding and billing of services. It’s the summation of all of these "touch-points" that make up excellence in the customer experience.
For the past decade, every company has been talking about excellence in customer experience, and any major service provider’s annual report contains language about the importance of the customer. But it often doesn’t match the reality of how that provider is investing its money. As we’ve all seen, customer experience is very often shortchanged in terms of investment, or more commonly is viewed in a very myopic way. It’s only been in the past several years that more and more providers are taking a holistic view of customer experience and its impact across the entire organization.
At our Management World 2012 event in Dublin earlier this year, the most highly attended track was “The Connected Customer Experience".
Based on this demand, we are organizing at Customer Experience Management Summit in Kuala Lumpur on November 27-28. One of the reasons we chose Asia is because it is the fastest growth region in terms of subscribers and has the biggest challenges in terms of volume of customers. Allied to this, Asia has the double challenge where high subscriber numbers are matched by very low revenue per subscriber. When you put those two things together, it forces a completely different level of innovation in customer experience than you’d see in other parts of the world.