Customer focus and cost reduction are the prime focus areas for telecoms service providers today. If tackled correctly, these objectives are not mutually exclusive, they are complementary.
Telcos need robust and realistic business cases to justify heavily scrutinized investment decisions. Greater use of automation and online service delivery move the service provider towards a lean and cost- efficient infrastructure, while simultaneously improving the customer experience.
If this is coupled with deeper personalization of services around the customer profile, then the customer experience improves and the service provider has an opportunity to create a more sustainable revenue stream.
The Telco Operations practice reviews fixed, mobile, and integrated service providers’ operational and transformation strategies, with specific reference to how they are improving the customer experience, becoming more customer centric, and managing their existing legacy infrastructure, services, and processes as they implement next-generation access.
We identify the current challenges and areas of business pain for telcos, their future business objectives, and activities required to achieve those objectives.
We will expand on our research into how network operators are improving their customer service. We will engage in deeper discussions with senior managers in care and customer service functions, and evaluate how successfully telecoms service providers are transforming their relationships with their customers.
Good customer service and high levels of customer satisfaction (net promoter scores) are products of efficient customer experience systems and processes. There is plenty here for the telcos to tackle, but chiefly they are looking at where they can automate processes as well as provide customer flexibility and autonomy through self-care. The experience online, on the mobile, in retail stores, and via the call center needs to be integrated for the customer as well as for the customer service agent for tangible improvements to occur and to reinforce the customer relationship.
Telco operations identifies the customer touchpoints that need attention and the actions telcos can take to improve their customer offers and support to not only meet but exceed customer expectations.
The absence of a single view of the customer and lack of integration across channels inhibits the delivery of a seamless and responsive experience for the customer, and adversely impacts areas within the telco such as product development and more effective and personalized marketing. Agile product development and management need to put the customer at the center of a process that draws on the distributed databases that hold information on the customer, product, usage, pricing data, and so forth. Only then can the telcos exploit that information for commercial gain.
We investigate the functional changes telcos need to make to organize and better utilize their customer data and improve their product development processes, which in turn generates personalized, higher- margin customer propositions.
The economic and competitive pressure on telcos means that they must review their operating model and how they respond and deliver to customers. Telcos are also coming under increasing scrutiny from investors to ensure that they are managing their portfolio to extract maximum value.
At the same time, telcos must seek to identify and address the opportunities and impact that technologies such as cloud, managed network and IT services, and social networks can have on their operations, as well as the internal changes required to deliver on the demands of new services such as M2M and cloud computing.
Getting more out of existing assets and expecting more from new assets are a prerequisite for growing the margin. Telcos need to grow revenues as well as manage the cost base in order to present themselves as viable ongoing concerns.
We will continue to look at activities where telcos can make a difference to both sides of the equation with research on managed services. More timely service assurance will ensure that potential network or service faults are effectively managed out of the business before they cause problems, and more informed policy management can also improve the telcos’ revenue recognition.
