New Tools for a New Perspective
Ensuring network reliability is but one piece of the customer experience puzzle, a puzzle which must be solved in this era of communications commoditization. Just as moving from traditional service assurance to operational intelligence represents a shift from a network-centric system to a customer-centric system, CSPs must evolve to become customer-centric organizations. There are many reasons why this matters now, more than ever:
- Solving a problem for a customer is an opportunity to increase loyalty and revenue
- Acquiring customers is expensive. The lifetime value of the customer is great enough that costs to retain and delight customers are much less than the acquisition cost of new customers.
- The ability to sell add-on services increases with personalized service options
- Brand equity, references and good will all increase
- The opportunity to grow share of wallet increases
To be sure, CSPs are increasingly aware of the need to become customer-centric organizations. According to a recent Ovum research report, Telco CIOs pegged customer experience improvement as the number one business goal over the next 12-24 months. And since traditional service assurance is blind to the network experience from the customers' perspective, it is no longer the best tool for the CSP of the future.
Convergence and Contextualization
At first glance, aggregating, correlating, and contextualizing data from multiple systems sounds like a steep challenge. Customer information is often fragmented across multiple systems in different business silos, such as CRM, provisioning, customer care and billing. To get a holistic view of the customer, CSPs have previously had to undertake major systems integration initiatives. These are time-consuming and costly.
Operational Intelligence deftly clears these hurdles, however. It is a modern, non-intrusive approach that enables CSPs to gain real-time visibility into all customer touch points and analyze the combined OSS/BSS data without undertaking painful integration projects. Armed with this converged and contextualized data, CSPs can take action to address potential problems, ameliorate error conditions, and move on newly exposed business opportunities.
To get a deeper understanding of the customer experience, additional external data sources can be mined as well. As a pioneer in Operational Intelligence, Vitria Technology Inc. has introduced the first, full-featured Operational Intelligence platform to the telecommunications industry. Vitria's Operational Intelligence platform correlates the high volume and variety of data in motion from social media activity streams, SMS messages, and other data sources, along with the contextualized network, customer, and device data, to develop a complete, real-time picture of the customer experience and the events that impact it. This fully informed view of the customer experience enables strategic action.
In short, Operational Intelligence makes it easy to aggregate and transform vast amounts of data from disparate sources into contextualized insight and actionable planning.
What's the ROI?
Even as CSPs are well aware they must evolve into customer-centric organizations, they are uncertain as to the best path. When faced with a CEM solution, an oft-heard question is: What's the ROI?
Operational Intelligence provides demonstrable improvements in customer experience, and has the added benefit of exposing new business opportunities, fast deployment, and lower cost.
For Telcos, the leading causes of churn are customer tickets and service issues. Service providers that have deployed Operational Intelligence have experienced up to 90 percent reductions in these issues. Further, since Operational Intelligence is non-intrusive, solutions cost less, are deployed faster and provide greater customer insight than traditional Service Assurance solutions.
