Customer Experience Management – Everyone’s doing it apparently….or are they?
By Steve Hateley, Director of Product Marketing, InfoVista
Recently, I’ve noticed more and more vendors are claiming to do “Customer Experience Management”. But I pose the question “are they?” or is it just a convenient phrase to align with for SEO (Search Engine Optimization).
As far as Customer Experience is concerned, it’s more of a broad Service Provider focus than a product capability, where operators are adopting a focus on “quality of delivered services” to maintain customer satisfaction – rather than focusing on how the network can evolve and operate efficiently. This is a wise and important trend from the virtuous circle of service delivery, in that if you can maintain customer satisfaction high, chances of retention, new customer attraction and perpetual investment funding will also remain high.
Get customer experience right or watch out!!!!
A word-to-caution however, if for some reason these operators do not have a change of focus to maintain the “customer experience,” chances are that this virtuous circle could turn into a vicious cycle, where poor experience leads to bad press and churn, decreasing ROI in new service and technology, creating negative cash flow, reduced ARPU and limited future investment for growth and innovation.
Customer Experience can be defined as a combination of QoS and QoE. As most will know, the QoS side is very well supported in the network with class-of-service implementation, queue prioritization and numerous OAM techniques leveraged by InfoVista’s traditional performance management products and solutions. QoE, on the other hand, is made up of subscriber service & application awareness PLUS aspects over which billing process, CRM and helpdesk offer a significant contribution. Business Analytics is another key contributor to truly understanding the customer experience.
InfoVista claims a warranted Customer Experience story – but this is in regards to how we help support service providers and operators in transforming their approach to customer service management. InfoVista’s Vista360 enables providers to create and run SERVICE Operation Centres where the focus is very much biased towards the customer and the network, and our “unified” proposition for network and application performance management provides the glue to associate Customer Experience issues to underpinning network issues – which in turn will expedite troubleshooting, improve reaction times and ultimately assist in maintaining a high-quality customer experience.
As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts.
