With the market for cellular customers now saturated across most of the developed world, minimising churn and retaining existing customers is becoming even more of a major priority for wireless operators. This is because it is demonstrably more cost-effective to retain existing customers than to attempt to win new ones from their competitors.
For this reason customer experience management (CEM) software is being widely adopted, and can enable mobile operators to continuously monitor and manage their customers proactively, and in real time, independent of the network or device being used. The objective of CEM is to establish and validate the overall experience of mobile customers, and also provide an insight into the types of user and the types of phone that are being used to access data services. If specific customer appear to be having a less-than-ideal user experience, the operator can not only improve the service quality for them but also target special offers that may encourage loyalty.
Dublin, Ireland, based Arantech is offering a CEM package called 'touchpoint', which comprises a set of software product features and services that together deliver a complete solution for managing customer experience. Touchpoint is currently targeted at communication service providers, including mobile operators and other communications-based network providers such as those supplying fixed-mobile convergence.
Touchpoint provides a simple proactive approach to first-line customer management and selling, and can support any network, service or device type, through its desktop portal. It also enables tight integration via APIs to other systems such as customer care, service management, and performance management, providing these systems with a high level of customer-centric capability. Touchpoint is able to identify rates and causes of call failure and dropout, and trace data error information. If high rates of failure are linked to congestion in a particular cell, the CEM helps to identify this and enables rapid resolution of the problem. This is more far-reaching than traditional monitoring techniques, which typically only provide network data and often ignore other factors, such as the possibility that a handset is not provisioned for a particular service.
The software can also identify phone type, e.g. iPhone, BlackBerry or Android, and compare statistics to see if problems are being more frequently encountered by a particular model of phone. Automatic action could then be triggered in the form of patch downloads over the network, or by sending SMS texts to affected users advising them to contact customer care representatives. In the longer term this data could even be used to decide which particular brand of phone to recommend to customers.
According to Arantech, touchpoint is already being used in four of the six largest mobile operator groups in the world, serving in excess of 250 million mobile subscribers.
