NetCracker cracks the customer needs code

The need to improve on business optimisation, customer personalisation and data consistency come through loud and clear in global survey of customer needs

NetCracker has released the results of its recent survey of more than 50 global communications service providers, focusing on their current customer care programmes, customer care priorities, and areas that can generate most improvement in customer experience.

The survey tackled both business process and system challenges, with results pointing to the need for improvement in three key areas: Business Optimisation, Customer Personalisation, and Data Consistency.

In addition, the survey suggests that nearly one third of the carriers who responded are not sufficiently customer-oriented at present to deliver required service quality and customer value, and are on the lookout for more comprehensive end-to-end solutions in the area of customer experience management. 

 “A rapidly changing market environment with a diversity of content and applications, multiple and often overlapping channels and touch points, and a wide variety of partners has exposed significant shortcomings in existing customer experience management systems,” said Sanjay Mewada, VP of Strategy for NetCracker. He went on to say that “New approaches that combine analytics with ease of interaction, process optimisation, and enhanced customer data management are keys to creating and delivering a compelling customer experience.”

Highlights of the survey results include the following:

• 28% of service providers identified the need to reduce problem resolution times as the number 1 area they are looking to address in a customer experience solution.
• To reduce problem resolution times, 22.7% indicated that there is a need for increased customer self-service capabilities.
• 53% ranked easy service subscription as their top priority in terms of enhancing personalised customer experience, followed by intuitive and personalized offerings at 45.5%.
• 59.1% indicated that having the ability to improve multi-channel communication with customers is the area that would produce the greatest overall improvement in customer experience.
• At present, phone communication is by far the most dominant channel that service providers use to communicate with their customers followed by email, IVR, and the web.
The survey results can best be summarized by looking at operator priorities in the following areas:
• Business Optimisation: Service providers recognize that they need to offer easy-to-use, self-service tools to enhance their customers’ experience. These tools give customers a tremendous feeling of empowerment by giving them the ability to manage their accounts.
• Customer Personalisation: Customers are demanding an increasingly personalized user experience. To deliver this, service providers need improved analytics and business intelligence tools to diversify and individualise offerings. This also requires service providers to optimize product lifecycle management and reduce time to market for multi-vendor services.
• Data Consistency: Data consistency across all platforms and touch points is essential to make possible self-service tools, personalized offerings, and multi-channel communications.

These findings demonstrate a close interdependency among all three top areas of customer experience. For example, easy service subscription requires consistency across all touch points, which in turn is the basis for more personalized offerings.