Aereo offers its customers multiple pathways to service, from a limited free model and single-use pass to monthly and yearly options. MSOs and MNOs with a video play offering should supply this flexibility and tie in real-time usage updates and incentives. Additionally, many popular ecosystems, including PayPal, want customers to use an alternative currency; legacy billing systems don’t have a way to track nontraditional currency.

Consolidating customer care into a single view across all channels is equally important; a unified, cross-channel system with a holistic customer view that’s able to pull the most relevant data for care agents is essential here. All too often, service providers are hindered by their siloed customer-care operations, which are largely the result of mergers, acquisitions and mash-ups that occurred in the back office. No customer wants to repeat his or her account information twice in one call, or remain on hold while being transferred to another office for simple inquiries. Likewise, self-service portals should project the same view whether it’s displayed on a smartphone, tablet or smart TV.

Evolving to deliver and support an empowered, personalized customer experience requires more than software that supports service convergence and next-gen customer care. “We talk about technology and systems, but we can’t underscore [enough] the importance of organizational changes,” says Dale Knipp, vice president of CSG International. Service providers must “change the paradigm from transaction-based, binary systems thinking to an experience-based paradigm that asks, ‘This is the experience we want, [so] how do we build or align systems to deliver the experience?’”

Differentiating with customer experience

The new competitive battleground isn’t a data-speed limit, a device or a technology—it’s the customer experience. If service providers want to make headway and leave systems-based thinking behind, they must:

• define a business strategy based on capabilities—build, buy, cloud, or partner?
• divine and deliver empowered, personalized experiences for customers;
• create the appropriate care culture for engagement and support;
• institute organizational change.

The future belongs to the companies that focus on giving customers choice and allowing them to personalize their experience as much as they want while providing value that makes sense. That is the crux of the age of the customer.