Customer experience management - It’s not all snake oil
Customer experience management (CEM) is an area of interest in telco, but a lot of vendors have simply repackaged or made incremental upgrades to older solutions so that they can be sold as CEM. A ground-up rethinking is needed if the benefits of CEM are to come to pass, and Huawei has one – SmartCare.
Clear signals but a lot of noise
Communication service providers (CSPs) are having a hard time at the moment. Fierce competition is constraining revenue, while the need for capital investment remains high as consumers continue to demand ever greater amounts of faster, high-quality bandwidth. To make matters worse, the growing success of OTT players is not only decreasing demand for the CSP’s own value-added services, it’s also starting to separate the CSPs from their own customer base, moving them to the status of commoditised utility suppliers.
It is therefore not surprising that customer experience management (CEM), with its promise of greater customer loyalty, increased revenues and improved operational efficiency, is garnering so much interest within CSP management circles. However, cynicism is also creeping in. There are a lot of presentations floating around extolling the virtues of CEM, but very little hard evidence showing measurable business benefits.
The early CEM solutions deployed were not true CEM, but rather existing solutions re-branded for CEM. Unsurprisingly, the same old techniques yield the same old results, so the expected benefits of CEM often go unrealized. Thus far, hard evidence of business benefit is scarce, leading some to doubt the business value of CEM, comparing it to snake oil.
True CEM is not snake oil
In fact, if executed correctly, CEM really can deliver unprecedented business benefits to the CSP. Huawei’s SmartCare CEM solutions create business value for the CSP via two distinct mechanisms.
First, the new insights & capabilities delivered by our applications & services (which incorporate true CEM) allow a CSP to measure and tightly control customer experience, leading to higher revenue and reduced costs.
Second, the change of mindset and actionable insights that accrue from adopting CEM promote business transformation, leading to more efficient and effective operations.
The customer lifecycle
Accurate, user-centric customer experience metrics are the basis of successful CEM implementation, but what exactly should be measured?
The first step is to identify all the possible activities and interactions likely to occur between the customer and the CSP during the course of their relationship. Together, these form the customer lifecycle (Figure 1).
Each of the activities identified along the customer lifecycle can take place via a number of different channels - online, telephone, or in-shop. An interaction between the customer and CSP over a specific channel is known as a touch point, and each touch point represents an opportunity for the CSP to delight or disappoint the customer. A given customer activity, known as a journey, may include several touch points, with all contributing to the overall experience. For example, the “payment” journey may consist of three touch points - bill receipt by mail, bill query by phone, and bill payment online.
Research shows that touch points should not be considered in isolation. This is not surprising since one touch point will likely influence another. For example, there is little point in providing a Sunday delivery service for a new SIM/mobile if the activation department only works Monday to Friday. Similarly, offering a one-off six dollar upgrade package can be frustrating for the user if top-up vouchers can only be purchased in five dollar increments.
To assure customer experience, the CSP should analyze each touch point in turn and ensure that comprehensive processes are in place to govern every aspect of customer interaction during that touch point and its associated ones. The touch point should not only meet the customer’s need, and be as fast and simple as possible, but should also truly delight the customer. This requires the CSP to assess all operational services that contribute to each touch point and ensure that all likely use cases (customer needs) across touch points are considered.
Improvement through KQIs
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Therefore, metrics need to be implemented to monitor the performance of the CSP’s operational services against each use case. Where possible, these metrics should be measured on a per-user basis, so that each unique per-customer experience can be determined.
Individually or in combination, the collected metrics can then be used to generate an overall summary KQI of each touchpoint experience. These KQIs, when calibrated with subjective feedback, can then give a measure of the customer’s experience for the overall journey.
An example of the benefit of this technique is given in Figure 2, which shows the impact of webpage response delay on customer experience. In a traditional network management approach, the engineering team will strive to continuously decrease the webpage response time. However the additional insight given by a calibrated customer experience metric approach shows that there is very little perceived benefit to the customer in decreasing the response time below 2.9 seconds. So, rather than invest scarce and expensive resources in reducing the response time further, the CSP can invest those resources elsewhere.
This approach is very powerful, since it allows the CSP to implement a dashboard to monitor the true customer experience in near-real time. The same metrics can then be used to drill down to the root cause if any degradation in customer experience is observed. Figure 3 illustrates this closed-loop process.
Using this framework, there is no need to drown in torrents of big data. By focusing on the key metrics identified in the use case analysis, the CSP knows exactly which data to collect and monitor.
Evolving to SOC
The per-service, per-user experience insights that the metrics deliver allow the CSP to transform its management structure to focus on, and prioritize, those aspects of its operations which really impact customer experience.
This ultimately leads to the CSP being able to transform the traditional network operations center (NOC) into a service operations center (SOC), targeting manpower and investment where it is most required, and dismantling organizational silos in the process.
HUAWEI SmartCare CEM
The HUAWEI SmartCare® CEM solution offers a complete, clear three-layer structure of products & services for network, service, and customer experience assurance and improvement. It offers multi-channel customer interaction management, enabling customer journey and touch point experience optimization through customer experience use-case development, service modeling, service quality management process construction, and E2E service problem identification.
Read the full story
Clear signals but a lot of noise
Communication service providers (CSPs) are having a hard time at the moment. Fierce competition is constraining revenue, while the need for capital investment remains high as consumers continue to demand ever greater amounts of faster, high-quality bandwidth. To make matters worse, the growing success of OTT players is not only decreasing demand for the CSP’s own value-added services, it’s also starting to separate the CSPs from their own customer base, moving them to the status of commoditised utility suppliers.
It is therefore not surprising that customer experience management (CEM), with its promise of greater customer loyalty, increased revenues and improved operational efficiency, is garnering so much interest within CSP management circles. However, cynicism is also creeping in. There are a lot of presentations floating around extolling the virtues of CEM, but very little hard evidence showing measurable business benefits.
The early CEM solutions deployed were not true CEM, but rather existing solutions re-branded for CEM. Unsurprisingly, the same old techniques yield the same old results, so the expected benefits of CEM often go unrealized. Thus far, hard evidence of business benefit is scarce, leading some to doubt the business value of CEM, comparing it to snake oil.
True CEM is not snake oil
In fact, if executed correctly, CEM really can deliver unprecedented business benefits to the CSP. Huawei’s SmartCare CEM solutions create business value for the CSP via two distinct mechanisms.
First, the new insights & capabilities delivered by our applications & services (which incorporate true CEM) allow a CSP to measure and tightly control customer experience, leading to higher revenue and reduced costs.
Second, the change of mindset and actionable insights that accrue from adopting CEM promote business transformation, leading to more efficient and effective operations.
The customer lifecycle
Accurate, user-centric customer experience metrics are the basis of successful CEM implementation, but what exactly should be measured?
The first step is to identify all the possible activities and interactions likely to occur between the customer and the CSP during the course of their relationship. Together, these form the customer lifecycle (Figure 1).
Each of the activities identified along the customer lifecycle can take place via a number of different channels - online, telephone, or in-shop. An interaction between the customer and CSP over a specific channel is known as a touch point, and each touch point represents an opportunity for the CSP to delight or disappoint the customer. A given customer activity, known as a journey, may include several touch points, with all contributing to the overall experience. For example, the “payment” journey may consist of three touch points - bill receipt by mail, bill query by phone, and bill payment online.
Research shows that touch points should not be considered in isolation. This is not surprising since one touch point will likely influence another. For example, there is little point in providing a Sunday delivery service for a new SIM/mobile if the activation department only works Monday to Friday. Similarly, offering a one-off six dollar upgrade package can be frustrating for the user if top-up vouchers can only be purchased in five dollar increments.
To assure customer experience, the CSP should analyze each touch point in turn and ensure that comprehensive processes are in place to govern every aspect of customer interaction during that touch point and its associated ones. The touch point should not only meet the customer’s need, and be as fast and simple as possible, but should also truly delight the customer. This requires the CSP to assess all operational services that contribute to each touch point and ensure that all likely use cases (customer needs) across touch points are considered.
Improvement through KQIs
You can’t improve what you can’t measure. Therefore, metrics need to be implemented to monitor the performance of the CSP’s operational services against each use case. Where possible, these metrics should be measured on a per-user basis, so that each unique per-customer experience can be determined.
Individually or in combination, the collected metrics can then be used to generate an overall summary KQI of each touchpoint experience. These KQIs, when calibrated with subjective feedback, can then give a measure of the customer’s experience for the overall journey.
An example of the benefit of this technique is given in Figure 2, which shows the impact of webpage response delay on customer experience. In a traditional network management approach, the engineering team will strive to continuously decrease the webpage response time. However the additional insight given by a calibrated customer experience metric approach shows that there is very little perceived benefit to the customer in decreasing the response time below 2.9 seconds. So, rather than invest scarce and expensive resources in reducing the response time further, the CSP can invest those resources elsewhere.
This approach is very powerful, since it allows the CSP to implement a dashboard to monitor the true customer experience in near-real time. The same metrics can then be used to drill down to the root cause if any degradation in customer experience is observed. Figure 3 illustrates this closed-loop process.
Using this framework, there is no need to drown in torrents of big data. By focusing on the key metrics identified in the use case analysis, the CSP knows exactly which data to collect and monitor.
Evolving to SOC
The per-service, per-user experience insights that the metrics deliver allow the CSP to transform its management structure to focus on, and prioritize, those aspects of its operations which really impact customer experience.
This ultimately leads to the CSP being able to transform the traditional network operations center (NOC) into a service operations center (SOC), targeting manpower and investment where it is most required, and dismantling organizational silos in the process.
HUAWEI SmartCare CEM
The HUAWEI SmartCare® CEM solution offers a complete, clear three-layer structure of products & services for network, service, and customer experience assurance and improvement. It offers multi-channel customer interaction management, enabling customer journey and touch point experience optimization through customer experience use-case development, service modeling, service quality management process construction, and E2E service problem identification.
With HUAWEI SmartCare CEM, operators can deliver a superb customer lifecycle experience and transform from network-centricity towards service and user-centric operations– a genuine solution, without a trace of snake oil.
Read the full story