Management World Americas: What Constitutes the ‘Customer Experience’?

By Marc Lippe, Director, Worldwide Field and Corporate Marketing, InfoVista

As I previously mentioned, TM Forum’s Management World Americas took place this week. The conference agenda was a busy one, with some nice traffic to our Catalyst stand in Forumville and informative presentations from more than 100 speakers across seven different summits covering everything from the race to cloud services to delivering agile IT and operations to optimizing the customer experience.

In the latter summit, there was one particularly interesting session, led by Sean Allbee of Ericsson ConsumerLab, that discussed segmenting service providers’ customer bases, analyzing what services they are currently consuming and how their future usage will change in the coming years with the emergence of 4G, and determining how they define the customer experience. Sean even brought in a panel of consumers to talk about whether or not they bring their smartphones to bed, for example.

Some of the points during the presentation that stood out included:

• Mobile service use increased by about 63% in just two years, from 2009-2011. The growth was most dramatic among the following activities: social networking, app usage, emailing and mobile browsing—and video and mobile wallet services like ticketing are expected to be the next services to experience significant uptake.

• Network issues are clearly driving churn. The primary reason consumers cited switching service providers was quality of service and dropped calls (35%). Coverage issues (34%) came a close second.

• Those consumers that are considered to be “early adopters” and are more explorative in their service use are more likely to churn compared to “laggards”. But the majority of consumers have found 3G to be “good enough”.

As Sean also noted, what’s important to remember is that consumers are different people doing different things and have different thresholds of what constitutes “pain”—and a good customer experience is often invisible. Service providers need to understand their mix of customers, determine which segmentation they are most concerned about losing and, most importantly, what they can do to avoid that (whether it be improving download speeds for mobile browsing or latency for mobile games, for instance).

InfoVista believes that a unified network, service and application performance management platform is critical to ensuring this end-user quality of experience. With a tool that enables real-time visibility, proactive monitoring and easy troubleshooting, service providers can provide the simplicity, immediacy, reliability and convenience that customers desire, and prevent dissatisfaction, churn and lost revenue.

We hope Management World Americas attendees enjoyed their time in Orlando and look forward to seeing you at the next industry event.