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Putting the network at the heart of customer experience management


Johannesburg, 01 Aug 2011

The boom that Africa has experienced in mobile telecommunication services has created a unique market for communication service providers (CSP) to operate in. With mobile penetration well over 100% in many countries, and a rapidly changing usage paradigm, demand for new services outside of traditional voice and SMS is rapidly outpacing revenue growth, which is forcing CSPs to re-look at their customer acquisition and retention strategies.

There are many sales and marketing strategies that a CSP can take to help attract new business, reduce customer churn and provide the opportunity to up-sell existing subscribers with new services, new levels of service and new packages. "The mistake most CSPs make in this instance is to simply wage a price war against their competitors, which can often do more harm than good if the fundamental building blocks of customer experience management (CEM) are not in place," explains Houssem Ben Othman, Head of Business Solutions, Nokia Siemens Networks for the Africa region.

Ben Othman ascertains that pricing, speed and other technical elements can help to differentiate CSPs, but when you don't have the supporting elements in place to ensure the quality of an all-round customer experience, a CSP's efforts can often drive customers away, rather than create brand loyalty and activism. "By simply offering low cost data, for instance, a CSP can easily overburden the mobile network through user volume, which quickly degrades the service for customers," he says. "This is where CEM is starting to play a more crucial role in ensuring the long-term success of a CSP in Africa, and the rest of the world too for that matter."

The ultimate goal of CEM is customer retention, as customer acquisition costs continue to rise and the need to minimise churn becomes increasingly more important to the bottom line. This retention is achieved by moving customers from satisfied to loyal and then from loyal to advocate. Traditionally, managing the customer relationship fell within the realm of customer relationship management (CRM); however, CRM strategies and solutions are designed to focus on organisational operations such as product, price and enterprise processes to meet the needs of the individual customer, with minimal or no focus on customer needs and desires. The result is a mismatch between the organisation's approach to customer expectations and what customers actually want, resulting in the failure of many CRM implementations. CEM, on the other hand, is a strategy that focuses the operations and processes of a business around the importance of addressing customer experience in a holistic way, considering all the different touch points with end-users along the customer life cycle.

A recent NSN Acquisition and Retention study supports the need for a CEM approach in today's increasingly competitive marketplace, with the latest results showing that network and service quality have the greatest influence on customer retention in mature markets. In fact, since 2009 there has been a doubling in the number of people who cite quality as the reason they stay with their CSP.

"This means that in mature markets, customers are willing to pay for good service levels and quality," continues Ben Othman. "This is placing the network at the heart of successful CEM, as it governs a huge amount of the customer experience due to the explosion in mobile usage, especially with the increasing adoption and use of smart phones and tablets." This means that network providers and partners play an important role in enabling CSPs to deliver a superior customer experience by addressing the key components of network quality, namely capacity, latency, coverage and mobility.

"NSN helps CSPs achieve and maintain this network quality to enhance the customer experience by helping to control any increased capacity with our Quality of Service solution," explains Ben Othman. "This enables full parameterisation and flexible differentiation of all classes of users, which allows CSPs to offer preferential customised packages to different business, consumer, VIP and best-effort users that can be bundled and marketed with other attributes, such as monthly quotas, maximum bit rates or device offerings."

The other key network factors that pertain to successful CEM include offering lower latencies on high speed networks, and giving CSPs the ability to expand coverage in both urban and rural settings with minimal degradation in the quality of the service, which ultimately enables true mobility. "However, there is also a need to expand service offerings further as more next generation networks come online and capacity and speed becomes largely commoditised," says Ben Othman. "This is where prioritised usage and performance guarantees, for example, can strike a good balance between quality and capacity, allowing CSPs to charge a premium for their service."

However, network quality means different things to different users, which is why it is imperative that CSPs have the ability to successfully differentiate. "Realising the important role that CEM plays, NSN has also established itself as a top provider of Subscriber Data Management (SDM), which allows CSPs to access and use key customer insights in real-time," continues Ben Othman. "The importance of this is that it allows us to look at a customer's specific usage data and unique needs to deliver an individualised experience that stops revenue leak for CSPs."

NSN achieves this by drawing customer insight data from multiple sources, including the network, service and device performance, real-time subscriber experience and service use. "This goldmine of information is critical to identify where, when and how to focus improvements in network and business processes that will reap the highest return at each stage of the customer life cycle" With real insights driving these business processes, CSPs can make fundamental changes in their operations, like proactively addressing the performance of the network and services in real time, and also allows them to engage in targeted and relevant marketing and promotions. So, as processes become automated, holistic and personalised, CSPs can act rather than react on the basis of immediate, real-time data from across their organisation.

"Therefore, by taking data from multiple sources, CSPs can turn it into insight about the actual and perceived experience, and the impact it has on loyalty. Then they can link this insight to concrete business actions that drive an excellent customer experience," he continues. "When this is combined with the right technical solutions it ensures a certain level of quality; enables an enriched customer experience and improves customer acquisition and retention. As such, CSPs become empowered to better differentiate themselves and build and maintain a large and loyal customer base, which is essential to business success in today's competitive marketplace," concludes Ben Othman.

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Nokia Siemens Networks

Nokia Siemens Networks is a leading global enabler of telecommunications services. With its focus on innovation and sustainability, the company provides a complete portfolio of mobile, fixed and converged network technology, as well as professional services including consultancy and systems integration, deployment, maintenance and managed services. It is one of the largest telecommunications hardware, software and professional services companies in the world. Operating in 150 countries, its headquarters are in Espoo, Finland. www.nokiasiemensnetworks.com. Talk about Nokia Siemens Networks news at http://blogs.nokiasiemensnetworks.com and find out if South Africa is exploiting the full potential of connectivity at http://www.connectivityscorecard.org/countries/south_africa.

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