Customer is king, but even the king needs a dose of reality

As over-the-top players like Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and others continue to inch their way into what has traditionally been the kingdom of telecom, it’s becoming apparent that functional fiefdoms and siloed systems within traditional telco environments are slowing the rapid rollout of an ever-expanding array of services. One company I talked to off the record this week said it has trouble managing the 1800 offerings in its portfolio — and that was just for its broadband business.

If service providers are to truly deliver a superior customer experience and build loyalty, they have to design, launch, bundle, reassemble and modify services quickly, which also means ensuring that new services are provisioned into billing and CRM systems so there is “right-the-first-time” delivery of services, not to mention accurate billing.

Today order “kick-outs” are all too common when launching new services or handling revisions or cancelations. Just as frequently, customer frustration around the lag in fulfillment causes a cancelation before the service is even activated.

The lack of integration and automation among order management, delivery, and other fulfillment systems and processes has caught up, as has the lack of automation for orchestration of changes and modifications to orders, as customers change their minds, services, devices and preferences — say, from a regular TV to HDTV, or from dial-up to DSL, or from triple to quadruple play.

Only with transformations that work to converge fixed and mobile business units, automate and integrate fulfillment and order management stacks, and create feedback loops from billing and CRM can the customer experience really begin to transform as well. And only then can carriers truly begin to leverage business intelligence tools and analytics that derive their strength from the quality of the data in repositories designed for both historical and real-time analytics to better service, sell and upsell/cross-sell to customers.

Operators are of course more than aware of this, as was evidenced last week during TM Forum’s show in Nice, France, where demonstrations, presentations and conferences revolved around reducing the time to launch, revise or decommission services. During the show, suppliers showed that they are working diligently with service providers to create out-of-the-box functionality for decomposition of orders, and orchestration of functionality and processes across networks, services and channels.

Operators are more than aware that the months it takes to launch a new service or a 40% loss due to revenue leakage or 20% order fallout rate is no longer tolerable. For this reason, they are working to re-model their portfolios and processes for fulfillment, assurance and billing so that order delivery is automatic and data for fulfillment is sent to the appropriate systems without the need to redo process flows for each and every offering. They need to stop the duplication of functions, which leads to enormous support and maintenance costs, as well as losses in revenue.

Operators also are working feverishly to accommodate different sales channels. They recognize some customers like to use interactive voice response systems, some insist on accessing a live person, some use the Internet and social media. For this reason, operators are looking for solutions that improve visibility of subscribers, their profiles, demographics, devices and preferences across all those channels. That will close some of the gaps through which orders or change requests will fall. If customer care can see what technicians have delivered in terms of set-top boxes or modems or if technicians can understand what sales and marketing is working to achieve, there can be a move toward that coveted 360-degree view of customers and services.

That view will be marred more and more by the very sharp rise in the sheer numbers of unique orders from consumer and enterprise customers. While all of these goals should be achieved by iterative and evolving strategies, the rising demands for self-care, more bandwidth and more services — over any device, any time of day — invites a sense of urgency that has never been as evident as it is today.

As evidenced by the announcements the past few months around solutions for proactive rather than reactive policy management, rating, charging and revenue assurance, it’s becoming apparent that in-network, online capabilities are the key to the kingdom — the kingdom where customers rule and operators are seen as “invaluable” to the experiences that make those customers productive, entertained and fulfilled.

Perhaps the time will come when the consumer “king,” however, will realize expectations have to be realistic. A time where the king realizes that a $99 phone and flat-rate plan will not yield the same performance as a high-end device with premium pricing. The king doesn’t go to a used car lot expecting to drive off with a brand-new, high-performance car for a few thousand dollars. Nor do customers expect premium channels with flat-rate TV bundles. Perhaps it’s time telecom start bringing a dose of reality to their customer bases, while trying to increasingly meet their demands.