CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Telcos today need customer experience management (CEM) solutions that help them understand all their customers' individual experiences in real time, but they need to overcome substantial political and technical barriers to achieve this vision, according to the latest report from Heavy Reading Service Provider IT Insider (www.heavyreading.com/servsoftware), a paid research service of Heavy Reading (www.heavyreading.com).
Customer Experience Management Still Needs to Bridge the Chasm discusses why the scope of CEM is both daunting many operators and preventing many CEM solution vendors from properly addressing it. The report identifies the key functions needed to create customer experience intelligence and looks at ways this intelligence drives action across an operator's organization. It evaluates the need for greater CEM automation and analyzes vendor strategies for supporting such automation, including the rise of embedded CEM analytics strategies. It assesses the strengths and weaknesses of 12 leading vendors in this market.
For a list of companies analyzed in this report, http://img.lightreading.com/ssi/pdf/spiti0911_companies.pdf
"Telcos recognize that CEM is becoming key to building brand loyalty, influencing customer sentiment, reducing churn, cross- and up-selling services to boost ARPU and cutting customer, device and service management costs," says Caroline Chappell, research analyst with Heavy Reading Service Provider IT Insider and author of the report. "The ability to capture and understand the events that can affect the customer experience in time to be able to influence and optimize that experience is a major source of differentiation for telcos."
For CEM to succeed, operators need to overcome the political barriers to such a solution, Chappell cautions. "Some telcos report that network functions are unwilling to share sources of customer experience data with other organizational domains, and vice versa. As a result, CEM is often being tackled piecemeal by individual telco functions, which reduces its effectiveness and can cause duplication of instrumentation, analytics engines and dashboards in an organization," she warns.
Key findings of Customer Experience Management Still Needs to Bridge the Chasm include:
- Amdocs' AIDA promises to take CEM to the next stage, automating decision-making to improve the customer experience.
- Standalone CEM solution vendors will feel increasing pressure from OSS/BSS vendors embedding CEM analytics in their suites.
- Nokia Siemens stands out among the major network equipment providers for having a well-articulated CEM strategy.
- By contrast, Alcatel-Lucent is underplaying Motive, and Ericsson still needs to explain how it will use its Telcordia assets.
- The shift to CEM will have a profound effect on the OSS/BSS stack and particularly the service assurance function.
Customer Experience Management Still Needs to Bridge the Chasm is available as part of an annual single-user subscription (six issues) to Heavy Reading Service Provider IT Insider, priced at $1,595. Individual reports are available for $900 (single-user license).
To subscribe, or for more information, please visit: www.heavyreading.com/servsoftware. For more information on all of Heavy Reading's Insider services, please visit www.heavyreading.com/research.
United Business Media Ltd.
