Customer experience management is as much about operators as it is about customers, both in terms of understanding what CEM is, and how it has to matter to every division in the company.
That was a recurring theme at a roundtable discussion between industry experts on the topic at the Mobile World Congress this week tackling the CEM issue.
Any conversation about CEM tends to split into two areas: reactive (i.e. customer care) and proactive (i.e. utilizing technologies from network optimization to analytics to provide good service that pre-empts calls to the contact center).
The challenge for operators is understanding that reactive and proactive CEM measures are two sides of the same coin, said David Ffoulkes-Jones, CEO of customer experience specialists WDS.
“They’re part of the same thing but not all operators look at it that way. They see it as two different things,” he said.
A related problem raised in the discussion is the organization structure of telcos and the tendency of different departments to be focused on their own missions – which leads to the attitude that CEM is the responsibility of a specific division or person.
“Customer experience is a process, not a technology or any one individual or group,” Ffoulkes-Jones said. “It’s about how the customer is marketed to, from the time they take the device out of the box to the time when they give it back. You have to manage that end-to-end lifecycle.”