Voice of the customer is a repeated process used by companies that want to understand customer’s preferences for engagement and levels of satisfaction with services delivered. To successfully execute a VOC activity, analytics will be applied in each phase of the customer journey. Customer experience management and analytics go hand in hand.
The telecommunication industry has put a priority on improving the customer experience. This is a top down driven initiative driven largely by increased competition from OTT players, revenue declines in core business segments, and an obsession to reduce subscriber churn. But a gap exist in truly understanding the customer experience often measured using NPS scoring and customer satisfaction surveys with the data reported in internal systems.
Customer Experience Analytics (CEA) closes the gap and helps take real time customer behavioral data and push this information into the hands of managers tasked with improving customer retention and satisfaction thru all stages of the customer lifecycle.
CEA is a strategic business imperative and it impacts marketing, customer care, network planning, and operations. The software systems if implemented properly bring together different data sets from different organizational groups to solve specific business problems. Most CSPs want to be more customer centric. Changes towards customer centricity is reflected in the fact that some CSPs have designed compensation models tied directly to NPS scores. When more employees have skin in the game, the culture of the organization begins to change. This focus on customer centricity is a result of competitive changes in the marketplace and a desire to generate more revenue from the same set of customers.
The CSP thinking a decade ago focused on the network. KPI’s measured network uptime, order to fulfillment timeframes, and mean time to resolve a problem. These metrics remain relevant but network faults increasingly are being correlated to customer impact. Metrics such as revenue per cell site drive new RAN deployments. The notion of improving the customer experience will vary depending on who you speak with inside a CSP and their ability to enact change in the organization. This includes both developed and developing countries.
The figure below provides some sample use cases by departmental group where CSPs can expect to achieve improvements in the business outcome by applying CEA techniques.