While meeting customer requirements is critical, exceeding them –and surpassing competitors’ ability to do so - can break the market wide open. From this perspective, the entire customer experience becomes a critical issue and the idea of quality extends beyond the voice call or data connection to include the speed with which orders are filled, the specific knowledge about the customer a CSR has, and the amount of self-service control and service personalization extended to the customer.
Customer Experience and Control Throughout
No matter the relative sophistication of the services in question, cable operators can gain critical competitive advantages by focusing on a high quality customer experience and an increasing level of customer control over services. Customer self-service will move from generic customer service portals to customized, branded customer interfaces. Early portals, some of which are already in service, will incorporate basic information and account management tools to assist customers in managing their service portfolios and billing, utilize online help and in some cases place orders for additional services.
As the service technologies become more intelligent, and the supporting back office fully automated, customer self-service portals will become extremely functional and will
serve both administrative and end-user functions. An administrator’s portal will allow a manager to handle all aspects of account management, such as submitting orders and following their status, setting permissions to determine which users have access to certain service sets and establishing tiered security policies. They will support everything from checking SLA compliance to fully automated service ordering, online trouble ticket submission and management or modification of any and all service features. So, for example, an administrator might use the portal to add more business lines, increase managed bandwidth or adjust guaranteed QoS based on the time of day.
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End-user portals will allow individuals to manage their own services, depending on their permissions, by selecting or unsubscribing to defined feature sets. For example, a user might add unified messaging or find-me-follow-me services to their voice features. Through the portal they may also adjust call routing policies, set a single-ring number, and set up standard functions like out-of-office messages for all of their email and voice mail accounts.
These same types of controls – administrative and end user - can and should be enabled for CSRs in the call center, before or in tandem with roll-outs to customer portals. The basic point is that if a business customer dials into a call center, whoever answers the call better understand who the customer is, what their service portfolio looks like, what additional services the network could deliver to them and what’s affected by and being done to fix any network problems. Any changes to the service portfolio should be
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Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 1 
