As competitive local exchange carriers (CLECs), energy companies and other service providers increasingly turn toward a more customer-centric customer model to compete in the telecommunications industry, customer care and self-care are becoming some of the most formidable weapons for survival.According to Paul Hughes, an industry analyst with The Yankee Group, Boston, "Good customer care gives consumers the impression that the service provider knows who they are talking to, so they feel as though they are becoming a more tightly integrated part of the whole system."
For service providers to compete effectively based on their customer care capabilities, they need a system that provides users with a single, integrated view of each customer on their desktops. In addition, the system must integrate with other business support systems such as billing and accounting. Of equal importance, it must be usable by departments across the enterprise.
All of this poses a technologically tall order, one that is not adequately filled by the current crop of existing call center-based customer care products.
Perhaps the most glaring problem with existing customer care systems is that they are largely untested in the demanding telecom environment. According to Hughes, most customer care vendors face a new challenge in the telecom market. "A lot of these other companies who have not been specifically in the billing space obviously have good products and they've been very successful in the financial and retail communities, but telecom is a completely different area."
| Self-care and customer centricity go hand-in-hand. What could be more customer-centric than establishing an environment where customers take care of themselves? |
User organizations such as marketing and customer care traditionally have relied on their internal information systems (IS) organizations and systems integrators to build call center applications. Increasingly, however, these organizations are looking to reduce costs and implementation times by using customizable packages supplied by independent software vendors (ISVs). To date, ISVs have not delivered.
Expectation levels for care-centric applications are low because current products often fail to provide even baseline functionality. Trouble ticketing, for example, is the primary way that many call centers use customer care applications. This network-centric approach is incompatible with the telecom industry's new customer-centric business direction. Customer care systems need many more advanced functions to realize their full potential. These include:
- Customization tools
- Fulfillment process automation
- Bill imaging capabilities
- Customer service representative (CSR) access to product/service information.
The inability to integrate current customer care applications with installed billing applications is a major obstacle in the minds of service providers. In fact, care-to-biller integration is widely considered the most critical application integration issue that end-user organizations face. According to Boston-based Aberdeen Group, integration of these two applications--which typically is viewed as too complex to attempt--would reduce call time frames by more than 45 percent. It would dramatically enhance customer care call center productivity at a time when most call centers are mired in first-generation capabilities such as inbound calling functionality.
Universal Agents
The concept of the "universal agent" is based on the ability to provide customers with a single contact and a consistent company view, making it easier for the customer to do business. Clearly, enterprise deployment of customer care systems has the potential to significantly improve customer relationships. By empowering all employees to handle customer requests and problems, the service provider becomes more responsive to customer needs and is more likely to build customer value and loyalty.
While a majority of incoming calls can be best answered by specialized call center-based CSRs, a properly configured enterprise-wide customer care and billing system could leverage a universal agent to expand customer service to other departments, including:
- Billing
- Sales
- Marketing
- Accounting
- Settlements
- Credit collection
- Engineering
- Service assurance
- Revenue assurance
- Fraud control.
The challenge is to create a new, fully integrated system that offers all the best practices associated with customer service in industries such as financial services and retail, but tailored to the unique demands and business needs of the telecom industry.
This new model could deal with a wide range of problems, including billing, customer service, product sales and support, and service delivery. It would capitalize on the trend toward self-care and integrate a range of telecom call center and enterprise-wide applications. Through this integration, it would provide a single view of each customer on an integrated call center desktop or workstation anywhere across the enterprise. CSRs could provide complete customer care through a single interface, enabling call centers to blend inbound and outbound calls to maximize all forms of customer communications and increase call center productivity.
On the Horizon
Successfully creating this new customer care model requires advanced computer telephony integration (CTI) capabilities, self-care functionality, access to a wide range of knowledge sources, embedded business rules and integration with core production applications such as billing.
This next-generation system needs to be extensively configurable to create a high level of user flexibility. During installation, for example, a company could configure the types of calls it will receive, how it will classify those contacts, what information it wants to enter and which of its systems it needs to integrate with the customer care system.
This flexibility would allow all call center CSRs to handle either a complete spectrum or a limited range of customer calls. Some organizations may want new employees to concentrate on one area such as customer service or sales, for example. Once trained, they would then move on to a different area or begin fielding a wide variety of calls.
A properly configured system created on this new customer care model also could determine the likelihood of churn by leveraging enterprise-wide knowledge of individual customers. Using fewer services, not belonging to a loyalty program, a history of complaints, a number of service problems or a contract that's about to expire all would flag a customer as showing strong churn potential. Based on this knowledge, the system could trigger a variety of operations such as notifying an account manager, scheduling a callback or popping up a script on a CSR's desktop with relevant customer data and retention strategies.
The customer care system would tie all necessary back-end systems together and use sophisticated call routing, data searching and analysis engines to gather and present data to CSRs, marketing or salespeople before they begin talking to the customer. Once on the call, the CSR or marketing person could call up a script containing a retention strategy as well as access information about previous calls.
Dynamic scripting capabilities would address the ongoing nature of the call as the CSRs entered information into the system. As a conversation proceeded, the system would again pop up appropriate scripts, prompting CSRs to ask additional questions about the customer's service usage, current needs or past problems.
CSRs also could use the search, analysis and dynamic scripting capabilities of such a system to proactively search for new service prospects among current customers, making CSRs more productive by moving them beyond their reactive complaint response and resolution role.
Properly configured, the search and analysis engine of this system could prompt systems users, including marketing personnel and CSRs, to build their own searches based on available data. For instance, a product marketing person could drag and drop a command to search for all customers who have a last name that sounds like "Martin," and who has children. Or, as part of a telemarketing campaign, CSRs could search for business customers in a particular industry in a certain geographical area. This system would produce a list that could be loaded into a predictive dialer or used to help detect patterns in the customer base.
Once a CSR is on a call, the system's dynamic scripting capabilities would prompt the CSR to gather relevant customer information. The system then could use this information to create a package of services that most closely meets the customer's needs.
Self-Care
In addition to empowering CSRs and other systems users, a customer-centric model would put the customer in control by using system prompts to provide customers with all the information they want. This customer control can be extended by self-care capabilities.
Self-care and customer centricity go hand-in-hand. What could be more customer-centric than establishing an environment where customers take care of themselves? At a time when millions of people around the world are enhancing their personal lives via Internet interaction, it makes sense for changes in the business world to reflect this more personally assertive and independent attitude.
An enterprise-wide, telecom customer care system built on this new model would deliver more sophisticated self-care functionality to customers. This functionality would provide the means for sample ordering, sample bill questioning, bill paying, online help, customer usage analysis and service level agreements (SLAs), among other functions.
Automating Tasks
Despite the ability of a customer-centric system to resolve most customer care problems on the spot, some solutions do require follow-up. For a system built on this new model, a full-featured call center workflow system would manage the follow-up process. This workflow system would automatically enter follow-up requirements--such as involving an account executive over a billing dispute--as needed. Ideally, however, CSRs would still be able to enter a request for follow-up activity such as a callback.
The system also would use an escalation agent to ensure that fixes are done in a timely manner, allowing companies to adhere to their SLAs. If the fix process falls behind schedule, the system's escalation agent would notify the appropriate people by e-mail and reassign tasks. Further, the system could at any time provide an update on automated workflow activities, the remaining steps to be taken, and the amount of time they would take.
The system also could identify and proactively address potential customer problems. For example, a service provider may realize it has customers with multiple service problems in a certain area. The system could locate the names of those customers and send them a letter or a rebate.
When the telecommunications industry was first deregulated, a business of switches and wires quickly became one of service offerings. Legacy billing systems were the first to be found lacking in necessary functionality under this new model and a rush of third-party vendors stepped in to provide more complete solutions.
The current movement from a network-centric to a customer-centric business model is well under way in the telecom industry. Service providers realize only too well that replacing existing customers is prohibitively expensive and that retaining its hard-won customers requires a new approach. Again, existing systems are lacking the necessary components, and more full-featured solutions are likely to come from third-party developers, including the current crop of ISVs and convergent billing specialists. After all, they, too, must be responsive to their customers' needs.
Richard M. Aroian is vice president of marketing and strategic alliances at Saville Systems, Burlington, Mass. He can be reached at (781) 270-6500 or via e-mail at raroian@savillesys.com.
