Telcos are at a critical point in their relationship with customers; evolving technology and social media have made traditional CRM less effective, paving the way for customer experience management (CEM) as the new hope for telcos to improve their market standing. A recent report from Heavy Reading confirms this trend and notes that CEM is poised for significant growth in 2014.
Customer experience management goes beyond the perimeters of merely serving customers; it’s a combination of automation, analytics and service experience that help create an efficient user environment, help build loyalty and reduce customer churn by giving customers what they want, when they want it.
Analytical applications that discover insights are at the heart of any CEM system and vendors are trying to differentiate by trying to provide the broadest set of analytical applications that address the widest number of domains and the most value-added customer experience analytics that work out of the box.
But writer Caroline Chappell notes that the automation of the CEM-driven telco is still in its infancy; vendors and operators are using CEM systems, but vendors say most operator organizations can't support a high level of process automation yet.
Securing cross-organizational cooperation is seen as the main barrier to CEM adoption. Telcos still find it difficult to share data across a domain, establish a single view of the customer information, reduce data sprawl, and are unable to use business intelligence and analytics tools optimally.
Such challenges don’t seem to have deterred operators and vendors from moving ahead with their plans for CEM.
More telcos are evincing an interest in and increasing their investment on CEM, more vendors are entering the market, and more operators are looking to deploy holistic CEM systems that use analytics to improve customer service, increase customer satisfaction and enhance profitability.
"Telco spending on CEM is rising as more operators understand what CEM is and the benefits it can bring," explained Chappell, senior analyst with Heavy Reading.
However, as CEM becomes a large vendor market, it makes sense that standards are set in place.
The emerging TM Forum (News - Alert) CEM models and Metrics Framework is expected to help formalize industry CEM practices. Although these models and framework are largely vendor-driven and untested at present, they do offer a common language and benchmarks for CEM. Over a period of time, these tools will be validated and the CEM market will become more vibrant and versatile.
Edited by Rory J. Thompson