Customer experience management (CEM) is the ability to manage each interaction between the subscriber and the communications service provider (CSP) in the order, fulfilment, billing, customer care, and assurance of services consumed.
CEM is a strategic approach taken by the CSP to augment business processes and integrate myriad data sets and software systems to positively impact the subscriber’s experience. In order for a business to assess the customer experience, each interaction must be managed across each part of the business where the customer evaluates, orders, uses, and makes payment for the product or service.
The market forces that are increasing awareness of customer experience are, in part, being driven by the commoditisation of telecoms services – primarily voice services. In addition, the threat posed by new participants in the economy that offer premium services over a broadband network is accelerating investments in CEM. CSPs are investing billions of dollars in capital to provide convergent mobile and fixed broadband services to consumers and businesses, but this has not led to improvements in customer loyalty, which is reflected in price concessions and churn in mature segments of their business. Despite the incumbent status held by most Tier-1 and Tier-2 CSPs that serve millions of broadband and mobile subscribers, CSPs have acknowledged that their ability to assess customer satisfaction is limited. In many cases, subscriber information is scattered throughout different parts of the organisation, making it difficult to gain a unified view of the customer. At the same time, the convergence of services brings with it technology and operational challenges. Instead of having a single domain to manage, CSPs are faced with managing a tenfold increase in network and IT domains.
CEM has many facets because, to manage the customer experience effectively, different types of interaction between the customer and the CSP will need to occur over the lifecycle of the customer. The CEM areas in which CSPs are investing include: call centre customer care, which entails threading together incidents to avoid churn; order-to-activation of new services; self-service channels; service and network performance in real time; application transaction monitoring; mobile device management; more-precise marketing of new services; and personalisation.
This 42-page report provides forecast data, scenarios that evaluate CSPs' deployments in the current business environment, and an examination of the market drivers and leading suppliers in this segment.