Reader Forum: Evolving the customer experience from ‘great' to ‘personally relevant'

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but maintain some editorial control so as to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at:dmeyer@rcrwireless.com or tford@rcrwireless.com.
The notion of perfecting the customer experience is a common theme throughout the industry – no matter whom you talk to – and as more operators shift their focus from acquisition to monetization and retention, making this notion a reality is more important than ever. A recent report from Gartner on top CRM trends for 2010 stated, “For most organizations, the single most logical way to differentiate the business is through great customer experiences, rather than having the lowest cost or most innovative products and services.”
So what are operators doing to deliver a ‘great customer experience?’ Over the past few years, there have been significant strides in enhancing customer-initiated interactions – providing self-service tools to enhance the customer’s day-to-day processes, consolidating billing to provide customers a single view, and providing new touch points such as live support chats and even customer forums.
These advancements are impacting but how do operators continue to evolve their customer experience strategy to take it to the next level, to truly differentiate among the competition? The key is being relevant. This means acting in the context of a moment and providing customers access to products, services and content at the time it matters most – at the time a customer is most likely to realize its value. It means optimizing every customer-initiated interaction as well as proactively delivering experiences that position your network as a key influencer for your customer’s everyday decisions and lifestyle.
Context equals relevance
When talking about the idea of applying relevance to the up-sell and cross-sell of products and services to deliver an enhanced customer experience, it’s difficult not to talk about context. Context, in this case, is about understanding the conditions under which a specific customer is most likely to make a purchase. By tapping into the power of the network, and analyzing past purchase behaviour and usage patterns as well as location, social connectedness, adoption tendencies, and other environmental information, operators have a unique ability to understand the context of a customer’s specific needs.
Traditional marketing approaches often focus on identifying a product and then determining the optimal segment of customers for a specific offer. By leveraging in-depth customer profiling and predictive analytics, you can take a more customer-centric approach, targeting selection and delivery of more relevant products and services to individual customers. This not only drives higher penetration of a full range of products and services, but enhances the overall customer experience by establishing the operator as a trusted advisor that recognizes customers’ specific needs.
Imagine if you knew Anne’s failed attempts of repeatedly trying to get in touch with her teenage son on Friday nights and you could proactively send her an SMS offer promoting your ‘family locater’ service? Or predict that a SMB customer was going to increase its international calling by 20% in the next six months, prompting your inside sales rep to offer an upgraded international service plan? Or SMS Eric to notify him of his daughter’s new love for texting with a recommended data plan offer to avoid bill shock? Or alert a large enterprise of their near-threshold data circuits and recommended increase level?
From ‘great’ to ‘personally relevant’
According to Gartner, “Context-enriched services have the potential to create new revenue opportunities and improve the customer experience. These opportunities come at a time when carriers need to capitalize on the wealth of contextual information they hold about their customers.” By ‘acting’ on their unique customer data assets, operators can target the right customer at the right time with the right product, service or bundle – exposing them to what they want, when they want it. This ability to deliver a relevant and valuable experience to each and every customer, enables operators to evolve the customer experience beyond ‘great’ to ‘personally relevant’ – and truly differentiate themselves among their competition, and their customers.
Mark Sten is Co-founder and SVP Global Marketing & Carrier Relations for Globys (www.globys.com), a leading provider of contextual marketing solutions for the worldwide telecommunications market.