Astadia: Operators can use cloud to rethink customer service

The ‘end game’ for carriers has changed, as customer choices more and more revolve around devices, apps and solutions rather than the network. In such an environment, how operators approach customer service must change as well.

“Customers now go to a Best Buy or Wal-Mart and buy a phone they think has the apps and capabilities they want, and the carrier is just bundled in with little consideration by the consumer. The customers pour in through these retail channels over which operators have little or no control, which is having a profound affect on telecom operations,” said Jon Obermeyer, creative director of marketing for Astadia, a cloud integrator that has worked with Alltell, Vodafone, Everything Everywhere, BT and salesforce.com on CRM projects, customer service implementations and marketing automation. Obermeyer is also co-author of a recent white paper on the subject, “Satisfaction as a Service”, released by Astadia.

Obermeyer believes a rethink of how telcos conduct customer service is needed. “The goal is no longer selling your network or a well-established set of products, but rather how well you can maintain your customers, who see more and more reasons to possibly churn,” he said.

He believes operators will no longer fail or succeed based on their networks, but rather on customer service strategies built to mitigate churn. But telcos are challenged to overhaul customer service, because they don’t even know what they are selling half the time. There are now lists of new customers to whom they’ve never marketed anything, so they struggle to grasp who the new customers are, as well as their demographics, preferences, or history. There is no customer data until the device is sold by someone else and even then they struggle to get the relevant information they need to service and even cross-sell or upsell that customer, he said.

Because the retail channels through which phones are sold usually use their own systems, there is typically no quick way to tie the operator’s OSS and BSS with pertinent systems on the retailer’s end.

“The customer-service and billing systems today are still set up for the ‘old business model’ of network-centricity and products built and sold by operators,” said Obermeyer, noting that Excel spreadsheets and manual processes still haunt operator environments and the IT staffs in charge of trying to adjust them to today’s models and requirements.
“It is a major hindrance when existing billing systems, customer care and call center applications cannot be integrated, or aligned or scaled to accommodate the influx of new customers,” he said.

The solution, according to Obermeyer, is software- and integration-as-a-service models that enable operators to leverage existing call center, CRM, billing and analytics systems through an intermediary layer to existing systems.

To build that intermediary layer, Obermeyer recommends that operators consider how IT admins made obsolete by coming cloud automation can be re-trained to make a difference in customer care and churn rates. “Some of IT can be repurposed; people once in charge of managing servers or administering email can now do a lot to improve sales- and customer-service oriented processes and systems as a means to reducing churn.”

In other words, as certain IT responsibilities are moved to the cloud, operators should seek out IT folks that have shown themselves to be ‘in tune’ with business processes. “They should work with the VPs in charge of customer service to improve process flows and to integrate SaaS platforms with existing systems,” he said. “By investing in cloud platforms on which new applications can be developed and integrated, operators get service agility that frees customers from being wedged into traditional packages; they want a unique mix that can be tailored to their needs.”