Improving retail experience key to wireless future

Mobile operators need to vastly improve the in-store customer experience and better integrate their systems if their retail stores – which already enable large numbers of purchases and are poised to only grow in importance – are to become the competitive advantage operators need them to be.

That’s among the key takeaways from a new survey of more than 4000 consumers who had recently visited a service provider retail store. The survey, commissioned by vendor Amdocs and conducted by JD Power, found that although 60 percent of customers who visited a operator retail store said they planned to buy a new phone and plan, 25 percent of those visitors left making no purchase at all, citing a poor customer experience at the retail location.

Amdocs is aiming to address that problem with a new retail application, dubbed the Amdocs Retail Experience Solution, announced today. The platform is one of the first to explicitly target the telecom retail store, although other vendors – most notably Oracle – have strong retail platforms suitable for wireless stores. Most operator locations today, however, run a mix of custom-built solutions or simple “green-screen” apps that make life difficult for sales reps and less-than-enticing for would-be customers, said Ashvin Vellody, Yankee Group analyst and senior vice president.

“The big [retail] challenges for operators, especially in this economy, are managing churn and providing the best customer experience,” Vellody said, dubbing service provider stores the “last mile” of the customer service experience. “For years now, operators have lacked uniformity and synchronization among their customer interactions, online, at the call center and in their stores. The experiences are generally different because they are supported by different silos within the operators, with retail probably being the worst and most siloed of all.”

Amdocs’ new retail platform addresses this challenge via a set of pre-packaged products and services designed to manage customer interactions within store environments. The Amdocs Retail Interaction Manager is the in-store interface, letting store reps handle sales and service interactions with customers via a rich user interface that can be run on a kiosk or something more mobile, like a laptop or even a hand-held device. That lets reps get out from behind their desks and eliminates lines of customers waiting for in-store service, said Scott Kolman, managing director, customer management product marketing for Amdocs.

“While retail is an important channel, in fact a growing channel for service providers, it is not living up to its potential, mainly because of the consumer experience,” Kolman said. The user interface for the platform moves a sales rep step-by-step through the sales process, helping them understand the customer’s current set-up and needs and the available devices and services that might interest them. By making it mobile, reps can walk around the store demonstrating devices and upselling services on the fly, Kolman said. Reps can even pick up shopping carts from Web sites or in-process consultations with call center reps and finish them in-store.

The retail system also integrates with operator back-office systems – from Amdocs or other software providers – including in-store inventory systems, back-office CRM and call center platforms, product catalogs, service activation and more. Integration is handled via a service oriented architecture (SOA) plug-in approach that simplifies connecting the in-store platform to other systems.

“It’s very important to make sure the retail channel is integrated with the rest of the operation,” Amdocs Kolman said. That means not only pulling data from other systems, but if a customer changes an address or pays a bill in-store driving that data back into the operator’s IT systems. Such integration also decreases the number of calls in-store sales reps need to make to the call center for help and direction, further cutting costs.

The Amdocs platform represents an important trend from OSS/BSS vendors, which are increasingly talking less about technology and systems and more about serving the customer, said IDC analyst Elisabeth Rainge. “This announcement really opens up the customer experience discussion. It highlights that it’s not just monitoring, analytics or billing - it’s the business of the operator to focus on customer experience from the top to bottom of the organization,” Rainge said, noting that Amdocs acquisition of personalization vendor Changing Worlds likely influenced the direction of the new retail platform. “I think finally we start to see with this move how Amdocs’ technologies can have a direct impact on the individual subscriber.”

Improving the experience of that individual subscriber is vitally important for wireless operator as competition continues to increase and smart phone devices and data plan options proliferate, adding further complexity to the sales process. .For instance, a smartphone sale can take up to 15 percent longer than a traditional phone purchase, the Amdocs/JD Power survey found, making it not only more complex but offering more exit points for a confused or unhappy customer.

Customers like to visit retail locations because they can touch and feel their new device, consult with an expert and walk out with their device right away, the found. Adding even more complexity – and import – to the retail experience is that many service providers are also adding sales and support for other services, like broadband or digital voice service. “The initial pain [in retail] has been on the wireless side, but the same dynamics hold true for multiplay services,” said Kolman.

Amdocs designed its new retail with service providers and has several customers looking at proof of concept deployments. It expects commercial deployments beginning next year, Kolman said.