CRM meets CEM
11 July 2007
GSM>3G Vision
In the mobile communications industry's continuing attempts to refine assessment of end user needs and respond to them, the number of vendor offerings to help operators to understand the customer just goes on growing. However, is the profusion of terms in the CRM space getting us any nearer to successfully serving the end user?
Take for instance 'customer experience'. Is this just a buzzphrase? Not according to Brendan McDonagh, the CEO of Arantech. Then again, providing customer experience management (CEM) systems to communications service providers is a central part of his company's offering. But what does it mean? And what difference is there between CEM and, say, QoS?
CEM isn't, it seems, a recent innovation - at lest not by the standards of the mobile communications industry. It was pioneered, says McDonagh, in 2001-2002 with the aim of solving what he calls "a real business problem - that of end users complaining about service experience problems, problems that the operator's OSS management systems were not identifying and, which, as a result, were still showing a 'green light'".
By taking transactional, real-time feeds from the network and defining and measuring experience indicators on a per-customer, real-time basis, a newly developed CEM solution was able to identify the specific customer problems - in turn, he says, revealing gaps in end user experience measurement.Thus, McDonagh says, while QoS measures service delivery at a network level, CEM drills down to individual end user experience, using experience indicators in transaction-orientated networks in real time. "Doing this highlights any experience gap, which in turn identifies customer satisfaction, churn potential, lost revenue, brand damage and negative and positive advocacy," he says.
All of which sounds reasonable, but, even though just about everyone in the mobile industry has for some years been using terms like 'customer-focused' and 'user-friendly', the fact that Arantech is selling a concept like CEM implies that we are still apparently unable to guarantee a high level of customer satisfaction. Why is this?
For McDonagh one answer is that vendors have been trying to address the problem from an asset perspective - a network element or a service model. By contrast, if you can measure all customers, all of the time, in real time, he says, "you can then look at how these customers are using and consuming both services and other network assets". However, his addendum may explain why this isn't an easy feat to accomplish. "In a network management or service management system, tens of thousands of elements are being measured and managed. In a customer-centric solution tens of millions are involved," he points out.
Of course having customers monitored in this way is not just about understanding why they are complaining. In theory a service provider can start to manage its customers proactively - "improving the experience of your customers even if they haven't reported a problem", as McDonagh puts it, adding: "Most customer experience problems don't even get reported to the customer care department." For instance, he says, often customers try to send MMS messages but do not succeed on the first attempt; they try again, and maybe once more, before giving up altogether. They don't call customer care, they just stop using the service. "Across every network on which we have deployed our CEM solution, we see about 30 per cent of subscribers attempting to use services and failing, failures that are related to customer-centric problems and not network-related problems," he says, and points out that an effective CEM solution can build user-defined groups, for example by customer segment or corporate group, or dynamic groups based on handset usage or error conditions.
