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Take the opportunity to enhance the customer experience
At a time when service providers need to move quickly to launch new products and retain customers, they are hitting a product data management wall that leads to slow response times, reduced customer satisfaction, increased churn and lost revenue. With product maintenance handled across multiple systems and without uniform visibility, introducing a new product may require manual intervention, introducing errors that further slow the launch process.
Managing relationships
In addressing product catalogue issues, service providers need to look beyond the immediate challenge to the long term opportunity; using network consolidation to align business and operations support systems (BSS and OSS) with delivering superior service experience to customers. By delivering value to the customer, the company boosts satisfaction and loyalty, and opens the door to new cross sell and up sell opportunities that will drive greater
value from the relationship over the life of the account.
The way forward is relationship management, a new approach, which spans strategies, operations, new technologies and solutions to ensure a loyal, profitable customer base. Two developments that aid in this process, during and after network consolidation, are enterprise product management and predictive analytics.
Enterprise product management
Enterprise product management provides a consistent, unified approach to new product development across the enterprise, ensuring orders are accurately captured in real time, thus supporting rapid, spot-on service fulfillment. This single platform approach to product catalogue management improves operational efficiency to deliver lower costs, higher margins and greater customer satisfaction.
Enterprise product management eliminates the delays typical of fragmented legacy systems, thus significantly speeding new product launches for customers and improving the product lifecycle process. As products reach the end of their lifecycle, they can quickly be replaced with newer offerings geared to the customer’s constantly changing needs and interests.
Enterprise product management is not only about saving money, but also about making it. An enterprise approach enables a service provider to boost ROI on next generation networks by leveraging network assets as reusable components. Furthermore, enterprise product management works hand in hand with another relationship management solution to optimise the profit value of each customer through cross sell and up sell activities, and by ensuring customer retention over the full lifecycle of the account.
Predictive analytics
Predictive analytics allows service providers to develop products based on known customer preferences, and offer them in real time during customer interactions. This solution sifts through mountains of data to provide a precise, real time view of the customer, including services used, billing and known preferences.
Among the benefits, predictive analytics proactively automates custom tailored offers, and delivers pertinent data to a customer service representative’s desktop during an interaction. Because the value of the customer is known in real time, the operator can deliver the appropriate level of service, based on the value of the customer.
Growing in popularity within the telecoms industry, predictive analytics solutions can pull up the customer’s profile on the agent’s screen as soon as they make a telephone enquiry. Seeing that the customer keeps tabs on their favourite football team’s game highlights via his mobile phone, the system then prompts the agent to tell the customer about a new mobile video offer featuring their favourite team. The mobile service provider’s ability to extend the offer proactively, and in real time, creates a positive experience that increases that customer’s satisfaction and loyalty.
The combined power of enterprise product management systems and predictive analytics not only drives revenue, but also saves customers. If that football fan had paid for a pricey feature on his mobile phone but not yet activated it, the predictive analytics system spots the error immediately and sends an automated alert to the customer with simple instructions on how to activate the feature. Alternately, predictive analytics can send the alert to an agent during a live customer interaction. By catching a mistake before it becomes a problem, the system ensures a higher level of customer satisfaction.
For service providers, using predictive analytics was until recently more challenging due to the multitude of product catalogues to be managed; the more catalogues, the greater the number of policies required within a predictive analytics solution to generate offers. But now enterprise product management facilitates predictive analytics, providing a consistent set of product definitions and reducing the policies required to generate offers.
Brave new world
With the convergence of the communications and media marketplace, service providers are coming up against new competition in the form of cable and internet service operators and the new generation of content packagers.
Service providers should leverage this time of network consolidation as an opportunity to embrace relationship management solutions that deliver greater value to the customer and to the corporate bottom line. A brave new world of financial performance awaits those that decide to transform the BSS and OSS as a vehicle for supporting the superior service experience.
Convergys is a global provider of customer care, human resources and billing services.
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