CEM Centric Approach for CSPs: Improving Customer

Experience and Assessing CEM Maturity Level

Dr. Shekhar Tankhiwale, Atul Ghadge

Abstract:
Communications Service Providers (CSPs) are facing numerous challenges these days with commoditization of the networks and the competition from Over the Top
(OTT) Content players for the revenue. There is a growing realization in CSPs to shift their focus from just offering connectivity service and networks to customers to
being a value added service provider. Customer Experience Management (CEM) centric approach enables CSPs to offer services and differentiated experience to
consumers to remain competitive. Staying ahead of competition to protect revenues and increase ROIs on the network services with effective Customer
Experience Management are the key imperatives for the Communications Service Providers (CSPs).

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is also important for CSPs to gain insight into customer behavior pattern and experience on network, and offer
individualistic offerings to upsell. In this article we briefly discuss:

I. Key challenges for the CSPs and the role of Customer Experience Management (CEM)
II. The traditional approach to CEM
III. The new CEM Centric Solution approach which entails Customer Experience (CEx) Centric remodeling of the resources and CEM Maturity Model
assessments to improve Customer Experience (CEx)
IV. Business benefits with the CEM Maturity Model

I. Key Challenges for CSPs and the Role of Customer Experience Management (CEM)
Mobility and data consumptions are growing like never before and the network infrastructure is in constant need of evolution to cope with the demand. CSPs are
facing challenges to meet the growing consumption demand while at the same time to live up to customer’s expectations of service qualities at the times when
price per MB is dropping and traditional services like voice are either offered very cheap or in some cases even free.
CSPs who were earlier fighting with each other to get more customers on their network now have totally new competition from OTT players and content
providers. With the advanced technology, changing business models, and environment, the connectivity (network) is commoditized. Telcos can no longer get
price premium or monopolistic prices for just connectivity.

The growth in the data consumption is at 49% CAGR and will touch ~50Exabytes
per month. The revenues have not grown with the same rates and revenue of
traditional services like voice is flat. The capital inflows in Telecom sector is tight
with new competition, from the OTT players.

Figure 1: Growth in Consumption: Source CISCO

Customers are looking for better quality services and value added offerings from their CSP and are even ready to pay premium for this. At the same time cost of
acquiring a new customer is 5 times more than retaining the customer and it is much easier to upsell than acquire new customers.

Figure 2: Revenue Vs Consumption. Source: Cisco Figure 3: CSPs with CEM Focus Vs Laggards. Source: S&P 500.
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 CSPs offering higher Customer Experience are doing fairly well compared to the ones not valuing the Customer Experience (CEx) as the stocks of CSPs with
effective CEM approach are faring much better that the ones with laggard approach. These CSPs attract more investments to further improve their services
climbing up the CEM maturity model. Applying CEM centric approach on the existing resources like network, tools and processes where data is playing key
differentiator for CSPs to increase revenue with upsell and new offerings. CEM also helps prioritize spending on the infrastructure.

II. Traditional Approach to CEM

Traditional Services approach is passive and reactive. The process tools and data run in silos with very little integration for customer’s experience to overall
incidents. The focus is on troubleshooting and repairs of the network equipment and fixing & improving the services. The fault management and service
management is isolated from other departments touching customers like marketing / billing.

Figure 4: CSPs Network Services Traditional Stack

The action trigger is either the customer generated issue or the impact issue where service or performance is noticeably degraded. Customer touch points are
not aware of individual customer experience and are not managing customer as an individual who has some feeling, opinion, and experience with his/her
interaction with the services. This approach misses a great opportunity of adding value to the customer’s experience at all the touch points with the use of each
customer’s past data, interaction pattern with network, and proactive approach. CSPs are loaded with millions of customers, billions of daily transactions, and
petabytes of customer data. Making sense and extracting value out of this huge data is a challenge but equally rewarding.

III. Customer Experience Management (CEM) Centric Solution:

A. Customer Experience (CEx) Centric remodeling of the existing resources
Customer Experience centric approach evolves around customers. Tieto enables the optimum use of existing resources of CSPs like processes, systems, and data.
Tieto enables CSPs to remodel these resources to start with the customer first and work back to optimize results. Insight to customer interaction drives all the
resources.

Figure 5: CEM Centric approach: Consolidation and integration of Tools, Data and Processes.

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© Tieto Corporation newsletter_cem centric approach for csps and maturity model v 0.6
 Process Consolidation: Process Consolidations consider all the processes of customer facing functions including service and fault management, and rework on
consolidation of these processes to provide customer centric approach. For example, consider the ticket troubleshooting process; normally tickets are created for
any issue and then sent to ticket owners. The owner considers the issue, troubleshooting is undertaken, the issue is resolved and the ticket closed. The CEM focus
would require proactive communication of any network issue to the customers upfront. All customer touch points have customer’s details and have insights to
customer’s ongoing Experience.

Tools Consolidation: CSPs have multivendor environment and several tools in the networks. Consolidating and giving consistent experience to customers with
the interaction, consolidating the platforms of customer interaction with Omni channel and Omni Platform experience are some of the challenges. The
consolidation of the tools is needed to store the customer interactions and correlate this data across interfaces for each customer session. For example,
Customer Self-help tool gives consistent experience like an interaction with the online customer support or the instore experience.

Multi-level Data Consolidation: Consolidating the data across multiple layers of data flow of customer interaction is also the key. The data correlation is
important to relate network issue with the customer experience impact. For example: Data from Consumption pattern of customer and service issues faced by
customer would provide insight to the campaign going to the customer giving better individual offering and increasing uptake.

B. CEM Maturity Model and Assessments to improve Customer Experience (CEx)

The CEM centric approach has CEM maturity model as the guiding tool and acts as a framework which assesses the current resources of CSPs for customer
experience and implementation of Customer Experience (CEx) driven decisions. Tieto helps CSPs to implement CEM Maturity Model for effective use of the
current resources to improve on Customer experience and use the huge data of each customer interaction within the CSPs network for further enhancement.

Figure 6: Tieto Business Services can help CSPs Scaling up CEM Maturity Model

Tieto helps CSPs in assessing current CEM Maturity level and scaling up pyramid with remodeling of current tools, processes, and data use and providing
improvements in these parameters. CSPs can consolidate their existing operations and integrate efforts toward CEM Model to gain better ROIs from the existing
systems, processes, tools and data.

IV. Business Benefits with the CEM Maturity Model

CEM Maturity Model provides CSPs with the operating model to assess and continuously improve on the CEM strategy to increase Customer loyalty, run more
effective real time campaigns, upsell and most importantly generate more ROIs from existing resources (Tools, Processes and Data) by focusing customer’s
interaction with the network.

Climbing up CEM Maturity levels can help clients use data for higher customer acquisition, increasing ARPU, reduction in service assurance cost, network
optimization and improved customer life cycle with the company.
Level0

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 Figure 7: Higher CEM Maturity Model Drives ROI in Each Unit of CSPs removing Silos

CEM maturity Model is the tool for CSPs to use the information to design and develop even new services and products for the customers.

CSPs can offer many value added and desired services easing life of customers when using network services, may it be mobile/ tab or broadband services or B2B
services thus protecting revenue against OTT players. It removes silos and integrates all the functions to drive better revenues, reduce costs, improve Customer
Experience and empower decisions thus delivering higher net promotor scores and increasing customer loyalty and share of business.

Tieto can help CSPs climb the CEM Maturity model to drive customer experience focused culture creating sustainable environment.

Figure 8: Tieto Helps CSPs to reach Apex of CEM Maturity Model

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