Agile Operator Survey: 2013 Opportunities and Threats

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From a regulatory compliance perspective, rural LECs must also seek changes to old rules that no longer apply in the current or future market.

How do I transform customer service from a cost center into a strategic asset?

So, you’ve made the strategic decision that customer experience is how you are going to differentiate yourself as a CSP. And as an organization you’ve made the business case that through reduced churn, improved customer loyalty and your increased ability to cross-sell and up-sell, customer experience will provide you with the sustainability you’re looking for. But how do you make this transformation?

Organizational change management: It needs to be understood throughout the organization that customer experience is the focus; this is not solely the responsibility of the customer service department. Every department will need to evaluate its current operations, especially in the areas of process, metrics and efficiencies; an example may be to prioritize first-call resolution and up-sell value per call over call handle time.
Channel management: If you’re going to provide an exceptional customer experience you need to be where your customers are, which means moving beyond the traditional channels of communication — phone, email — and onto the web and, yes, even social media. Social media provides the ability to completely transform brand image: if you are able to take a negative comment on Twitter and resolve that customer’s issue within the social channel, it not only increases the customer’s loyalty but also that of everyone watching your online conversation unfold, potentially touching thousands of customers.
360 degrees of the customer: It’s become an expectation of customers that you, the service provider, have access to all the interactions between you and them, including previous phone calls, emails, trouble tickets, service orders, etc. All of this information needs to be available to anyone interacting with your customers so that responses can be provided quickly and accurately.

What aspects of next-generation BSS should I look for as it relates to helping my business move toward a cloud-based environment?

Cloud services are still a relatively new offering for many CSPs, and therefore there is a wide range of business models. There will be three main aspects critical to any BSS with regard to the cloud: The first consideration is product catalog. Cloud services can have many business rules that need to be enforced through ordering and fulfillment; it is critical that the product catalog is able to model these appropriately. The second consideration is partner enablement. Whether your strategy is Infrastructure-, Platform- or Software-as-a-Service, inevitably you will need carefully evaluated and selected partners to deliver cloud services. The last consideration is billing. With cloud services there will likely be an aspect of recurring billing, but the majority will be based on collecting usage records, running through a mediation process and applying complex rating rules.

Overall, agility will be key when it comes to cloud services. This is a rapidly changing vertical that will continue to see a lot of innovation and competition, and an organization’s propensity for agility as enabled through partnerships and its own infrastructure will be crucial in successful adoption of the cloud.

When considering the cloud as a source of new revenue, what services will my customers be most inclined to buy, and what is the best way to position my organization for success?

The first step, and often the most overlooked one, is profiling your customer base. What types of customers do you serve? What types of services do they get from you? For example, if you serve a large population of small businesses that solely rely on you for internet, then the ideal scenario would be to up-sell value-added services such as backup and storage — in other words, services that compliment an existing offering, making for a much easier sell. If you are addressing a mostly consumer market, consider enhancing your existing broadband offerings to include consumer-friendly applications such as storage, email and even web hosting. It all comes down to knowing your customer, and once you understand your market, identifying the right cloud services to offer becomes simple and straightforward.