By Timo Ahomäki, VP, Product Management
When a service provider wants to offer a personalised experience they need to look at the technology available, the processes required and, above all the attitude they project.
The most important ingredient in personalising the user experience is the service provider’s attitude manifested in the day-to-day interactions with customers. No matter how sophisticated the process or how modern the technology, if the customer feels that various rules are preventing them receiving the expected level of service, they will walk away dissatisfied. A smooth and flexible experience does not have to mean yielding to any and all customer wishes, but instead be prepared to discuss their needs or problems and pinpoint the most valuable solutions to them.
As we all are more than aware, customer care can prove to be a very hectic environment. To relieve this pressure – as well as to cut costs, of course – service providers are increasingly directing customers to web based self-care. This is mostly fine, as long as the customer actually gets what they were looking for from the website.
If not then they will need to go back to talking to a customer service representative, which is not ideal. At this stage we often find the process and information flow is broken and the problem solving has to start from square one. Worse still, the offers and services available through self-care are often not available for purchase via call centers, even if the information of the failed transaction was available. It is here where the process needs to be flexible enough to allow a customer service representative or a point-of-sale representative to finish the transaction started in self-care, or vice versa.
From a simplistic point of view, all of this is achievable by pushing out the offerings from the various lines of business across all delivery channels, and ensuring that all personnel are flexible in dealing with customers. The downside of this approach, however, is proliferation of random product and service combinations leading to increased complexity across service provider operations and, eventually lost revenue from subscribers then cherry picking only the most compelling offers. In order to prevent these pitfalls, the service provider must ensure all customer service channels share the same guidelines on the customer themselves and also around the service, including any recommendations or things to avoid.
A unified product catalogue consolidates all products and services for multiple lines of businesses, initially originating from disparate and fragmented product repositories. Such a consolidated overlay provides a single view to all product information such as price, distribution channel and product specifications as well as a flexible set of recommendation and exclusion rules for in-house and third party products and services alike. A unified product catalogue can be introduced as a big bang, replacing all the disparate product catalogues in one blow. Just as well, if not better, a unified product catalogue can be taken into use as an overlay to existing product catalogues where separate product catalogues continue to exist over a period of time and they merge into one only over a longer transition period. In the end of the day, unified product catalogue must facilitate faster time-to-market.
Unfortunately, faster is not always better if it does not also mean becoming smarter. Moving from paper to practise, the true test of any service provider’s ability to execute any given plan will be at the customer touch point, were it in point-of-sale, customer care or online. In order to make sure all the relevant information is available where it matters the most, service providers should be able to offer a full customer view and real-time service availability informa- tion to all customer touch points in equal measure, and apply this insight spiced up with predictive analytics also in real time, in any given customer touch point.
It is only at this point, when we start to see the possibilities of what it means to understand a customer for the benefit of personalisation and improved customer experience.
The most important ingredient in personalising the user experience is the service provider’s attitude manifested in the day-to-day interactions with customers. No matter how sophisticated the process or how modern the technology, if the customer feels that various rules are preventing them receiving the expected level of service, they will walk away dissatisfied. A smooth and flexible experience does not have to mean yielding to any and all customer wishes, but instead be prepared to discuss their needs or problems and pinpoint the most valuable solutions to them.
If not then they will need to go back to talking to a customer service representative, which is not ideal. At this stage we often find the process and information flow is broken and the problem solving has to start from square one. Worse still, the offers and services available through self-care are often not available for purchase via call centers, even if the information of the failed transaction was available. It is here where the process needs to be flexible enough to allow a customer service representative or a point-of-sale representative to finish the transaction started in self-care, or vice versa.
From a simplistic point of view, all of this is achievable by pushing out the offerings from the various lines of business across all delivery channels, and ensuring that all personnel are flexible in dealing with customers. The downside of this approach, however, is proliferation of random product and service combinations leading to increased complexity across service provider operations and, eventually lost revenue from subscribers then cherry picking only the most compelling offers. In order to prevent these pitfalls, the service provider must ensure all customer service channels share the same guidelines on the customer themselves and also around the service, including any recommendations or things to avoid.
A unified product catalogue consolidates all products and services for multiple lines of businesses, initially originating from disparate and fragmented product repositories. Such a consolidated overlay provides a single view to all product information such as price, distribution channel and product specifications as well as a flexible set of recommendation and exclusion rules for in-house and third party products and services alike. A unified product catalogue can be introduced as a big bang, replacing all the disparate product catalogues in one blow. Just as well, if not better, a unified product catalogue can be taken into use as an overlay to existing product catalogues where separate product catalogues continue to exist over a period of time and they merge into one only over a longer transition period. In the end of the day, unified product catalogue must facilitate faster time-to-market.
Unfortunately, faster is not always better if it does not also mean becoming smarter. Moving from paper to practise, the true test of any service provider’s ability to execute any given plan will be at the customer touch point, were it in point-of-sale, customer care or online. In order to make sure all the relevant information is available where it matters the most, service providers should be able to offer a full customer view and real-time service availability informa- tion to all customer touch points in equal measure, and apply this insight spiced up with predictive analytics also in real time, in any given customer touch point.
It is only at this point, when we start to see the possibilities of what it means to understand a customer for the benefit of personalisation and improved customer experience.
