For many in Yankee Group’s line of business, May means Telemanagement World, the annual gathering of 3,500 of your favorite communications and digital economy software nerds. (Guilty as charged) Having outgrown the Acropolis Convention Hall in Nice, France, this assemblage of Communications Service Providers (CSPs), software and hardware vendors, standard bearers, analysts and media has moved to the new Convention Center Dublin in the heart of the city on the River Liffey. More than 600 companies from 80 countries are represented as we debate transformation strategies, learn about the latest products and hear case studies about ways to decrease offer time-to-market or operational cost reductions.
This year there is considerable attention being paid to what operational folk call Customer Experience Management. There is an awakening by CSPs (and those who supply to them) to the need to focus on the overall experience rather than simply the quality of the network service or the accuracy of a bill. In a definite sign of industry maturity, the talk now is about the need to be concerned with all stages of the customer lifecycle and, for example, to correlate network faults to a customer’s identity so that we can do a better job of providing customer service. All good, and by the way, we agree.
And as it has become fashionable to identify large political changes resulting in newfound individual liberties as ‘Springs’, one might even be tempted to characterize this emphasis on Customer Experience Management as a Telemanagement Spring. Or not.
Here’s the problem with that line of reasoning: since the beginnings of privatization nearly 30 years ago, the customer has had the freedom to choose between competitors for their services. And so for as many years there has been a need to be concerned with that experience to keep customers from leaving. And yet, we’re just now getting around to talking about it in forums concerned with the delivery of that experience? Sadly, yes.
The simple fact is this: it has always been about the total experience. We simply got waylaid by our desire to compete on price, followed by our pre-occupation with service plan bells and whistles, and capped off by our recent obsession with devices. Yankee Group sees the experience as the last and single most important means to compete in a lasting, differentiated manner. The mandate is clear: transform operations to compete on a better end-to-end customer experience, lest our Spring degrade into the Winter of Discontent.
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