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or roadmap. So you’re building complexity on a platform that hasn’t been renewed or aligned completely.” Second, he said, “The numbers are huge. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands, or millions, of people. How do you reach them all? People don’t want to be bothered. What do you do – send them a letter (sarcasm intended)?”

This is Konczal’s point exactly. You can’t reach out to every individual to create trust and upsell. Sales must be inherent in the customer’s experience with services and points of contact. It has to be more about shopping than selling; more about well lit mannequins in sexy clothes than telemarketers. If I’m flowing from web to mobile to TV, offers should be made to me subtly, based on my usage and preferences, with helpful hints for getting the most for my money. It has to be simple for me to buy what I want without standing in line, waiting on hold, or being told I’m not eligible for the great price on that product I just told you I want to buy.

Billing is a Problem
Konczal argues that the reason CSPs don’t provide anything remotely like this vision is because of their channel strategy – or lack thereof. “I think the biggest problem is the channel strategy,” he says. “I don’t think most CSPs have a clear channel strategy and don’t think about the buying experience in a unified way. They also think of sales channels as competing businesses or warring factions. That can’t fly anymore. Someone needs to say ‘we want an aligned channel strategy.’”

Another big problem is that pricing and product catalogs often live in billing systems and no one wants to touch them. “I’ve seen IT really trying to understand how the business needs to operate. But I think the issue is more about the continued dominance of billing. It’s still the issue in realizing a better sales environment.” CSPs don’t want to mess with billing systems because they collect revenue. Plus, problems with billing tend tolead to customer dissatisfaction and expensive calls into the contact center. Billing is complex, and too often that complexity ends up being manifested in sales and ordering processes.

Ordering and order management, however, have been addressed with layers of abstraction that make it easier to design, manage, simplify, and automate ordering processes. Many CSPs have done this with some degree of success. Konczal argues that the same concept needs to apply to sales. “There are tools meant to work with different billing, CRM, and product catalog systems to orchestrate the sales processes. Those orchestration tools are about how I can

experiences. Sterling has also helped companies like Best Buy and Borders to create continuous, compelling, and guided buying experiences across their online and in-store channels.

For CSPs, Konczal says, it’s not necessarily about jumping from where they are today to a complex, interactive, analytics-driven model in one step. More pragmatically, there are solutions that can help them in the short term to align their offers across their channels, provide visibility into customer activity as they move between channels, and leverage existing customer data to make sure knowledge of the customer is represented at each interaction point.

This makes it easy, for example, to give the customer a feeling of individuality – which leads to a personalized experience. It also makes it possible to make valuable offers to customers, rather than up-selling them products they already have or promotions they can’t access. Those would be the first, simple steps toward a better buying experience. With many new and more complex devices and applications coming to market, CSPs need to take these basic, pragmatic steps right now or risk overwhelming, confusing, and turning customers off.

In other words, cable operator #1 better make me feel like the Mac Daddy again, or I’ll probably just let Hulu and YouTube make this my Summer of George.