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January 30, 2006
Supporting Triple Play: Unique Customer Care Challenges of Bundled Services
Contributed by StarTek, Inc.
Customer Care & the Triple Play
A lot has been written about the technical challenges facing companies pursuing what’s become known as the Broadband Triple Play, with good reason: bundling video, data and voice services is a complex process that poses a number of technical hurdles to service providers.
Recently there has been a steady stream of articles about technical advancements in Triple Play implementation as well as a lot of news about collaborations between companies that are combining resources and expertise to address video-related technical issues. There has also been more written about the technical challenges of adding wireless to the mix to create a Quadruple Play.
The focus on Triple Play’s technical challenges is important, but there is another equally important challenge that has not received as much attention: providing integrated customer care across the disparate range of services involved in the Triple Play and Quadruple Play.
Not only is customer care an important issue for bundled service providers, I strongly believe that customer care will ultimately be the decisive factor in determining winners and losers in the Triple Play market.
That is because Triple Play raises the stakes when it comes to customer loyalty. Never before has so much revenue been tied to each existing customer, and never before has so much potential revenue been linked to each prospective customer. The short and long-term economic value of individual customers and the acquisition of new customers become magnified.
In the short term, expanding service offerings is a key factor in winning market share as customers pair up with vendors that offer their desired mix of services. But as the broadband market evolves, technologies and services will become standardized in a way that leaves customer service as the primary differentiator. As a result, optimizing customer support becomes a strategic imperative for Triple Play companies in order to retain broadband customers and maintain long-term revenues.
This article addresses a number of the key customer care challenges facing Triple Play service providers and offers insight into best practices for making customer care a competitive advantage in the Triple Play market.
The Customer Expectations Challenge
The overarching customer care challenge for Triple Play companies is an expectations challenge. The technologies that enable Triple Play services are new and rapidly evolving, and yet, customers expect the service reliability and performance of mature technologies.
Marketing efforts to promote new and bundled telecommunications services create the expectation of an “always-on” utility as dependable as water coming out of the tap or a dial-tone coming from a rotary phone. But it’s not.
While voice, video and data seem commonplace, the way in which they make it to our homes is still evolving and these technologies do not have the stability and reliability of those that are truly mature. Because of the complexity of implementation and the hiccups that can arise, customer care becomes very important as the means of maintaining customer satisfaction and retention during a Triple Play rollout.
Building a customer support infrastructure specifically designed for Triple Play is a must, because the challenges that the customer care group will face are more complex than what they have dealt with in the past when just supporting one or two services. Triple Play vendors must therefore begin addressing customer care as early as possible in the development process for their Triple Play initiative. The company’s customer care executives and outsourced customer care firms should be a part of the dialogue early in the process so that customer care processes can be built and ironed out in parallel to technical development.
Bundled Services, Bundled Vendors
One of the specific customer care challenges faced by Triple Play service providers is the complexity of unified support when Triple Play services are provided through multi-company collaborations.
A reality of achieving the Triple Play is that many vendors are learning that they cannot achieve it alone, at least in the short term when speed to market is at a premium. They need partners in order to have the right combination of infrastructure technologies to deliver video, high-speed data, phone and wireless. To offer aggregate services that are in line with consumer needs, telecommunications and cable companies are sub-contracting technologies and systems from third parties, and even from each other:
- Many companies with analog phone networks need partners for the high-bandwidth services because of the limitations of copper, even with today’s upgraded technologies;
- Cable companies have high-bandwidth infrastructure, but some do not have bi-directional capabilities, so partnering is often the most cost-effective way to achieve that functionality;
- Partnering is also a primary option for cable companies pursuing the Quadruple Play, because of the infrastructure necessary to support mobile phones.
The result is that many Triple Play service offerings are made possible by a patchwork of collaborating vendors and support firms under a single brand visible to the consumer. The complex network of relationships behind the scenes is invisible to consumers – hidden behind the single lead provider – and consumers naturally expect unified support from a single dependable source.
This makes it of critical importance for Triple Play service providers to have a comprehensive vision for what the customer care structure will look like, and to make that planning process a fundamental part of their dialogue with partners during the early phases of collaboration.
Higher Demands on Customer Support Agents
Another important customer care challenge Triple Play service providers will face is the greater variety of demands that will be placed on customer care representatives.
Just as the market demand among technology-savvy consumers is pulling the evolution of services, those same customers will expect a high level of support in managing those services. As a result, customer care agents will be expected to provide support and resolutions at a higher level, across a larger matrix of products and services.
To this degree, care agents, operations support systems, and business support systems will be required to integrate and align as never before. The tactical challenges of a phone connection being down, the cable TV being out, or the DSL not working become more complicated when these issues arise in any combination at any given time. It is this dimensional aspect to supporting broadband customers that will challenge, and ultimately define, the vendors of the broadband Triple Play.
Customer care agents supporting broadband services will be expected to serve customers in a consultative, strategic manner. Given the breadth of the product offering, a one-call resolution will only be achieved if the agents operate with a deeper skill-set in service, tech-support, and product management. This will require a broadband customer support provider to increase the training that a front-line agent receives so that the agent may deliver the service levels expected by the broadband customer.
This challenge makes it critically important for Triple Play service providers and their outsourced customer care firms to take a new approach to agent recruitment and training. Recruitment must focus on assembling a team of customer care representatives with the flexibility to effectively handle the greater variety of responsibilities needed to support Triple Play. The training program must also adapt for Triple Play, preparing the customer care team to achieve one-call resolution for a wide variety of issues that may arise during a single customer interaction.
Technology & Customer Care
Technology is another key challenge for providing customer care support for Triple Play service offerings. Customer care for bundled services requires more sophisticated workstations and software in order to equip agents with a more integrated, all inclusive “dashboard” of information.
Triple Play customer care will require the most complex customer care technologies that telecommunications companies have ever implemented for their customer service divisions.
These integrated dashboards will need to support:
- Billing and OSS for multiple services with disparate cost structures, ranging from simple monthly fees to complex minutes plans;
- Technical support functions for a broader range of services that may be built on infrastructure provided by a patchwork of behind-the-scenes partners and vendors;
- Customer implementation capabilities for new customers, including the complex start-up process for customers who are switching from other providers and keeping existing phone numbers and hardware;
- Sales support capabilities for marketing the full service offering to prospective customers, and for marketing additional services to existing customers;
- And many other customer care services.
Tripe Play service providers that outfit their customer care representatives with an integrated suite of technologies specifically designed to support the greater demands of Triple Play will have a clear competitive advantage in winning the customer satisfaction and customer retention battle.
It will therefore be important for Triple Play service providers, outsourced customer care firms and customer care software vendors to collaborate closely in designing customized solutions that fit the complex needs of Triple Play support.
Supporting the Brand
The last Triple Play customer care challenge that I will comment on is related to branding. Branding is usually a topic reserved for the marketing, advertising and public relations teams to focus on, but customer care has a critical role to play in the branding process for Triple Play service providers.
Every company that is pursuing the Triple Play or Quadruple Play is a company in transition:
- Cable companies are transforming into providers of data and voice services;
- Traditional phone companies are adding video services; and
- Smaller broadband companies are positioning themselves as full-service telecom companies.
As part of these transitions, Triple Play service providers are all growing out of their old brand identity, and therefore face the challenge of establishing brand recognition for their broader range of services and new corporate identity. One of key ways that service providers can support their broader brand strategy is through customer care interaction, which gives companies a one-on-one opportunity to re-enforce the brand to customers in a way that supports the company’s marketing goals.
To this end, customer care agents need to embrace the role of being stewards of the company’s brand. Customer care executives and their outsourced customer care firms must collaborate with the marketing and communications departments to understand the company’s overarching branding goals, and to map customer care processes to support those branding goals. The branding strategy can then inform a range of customer care processes to ensure that each interaction with a customer – from a technical support call to a billing inquiry – appropriately supports those branding objectives.
Winning the Triple Play
There are a number of factors for achieving success in the Triple Play market, and I believe that effectively adapting customer care to meet the specific challenges of these bundled services will be a decisive and critical factor. Ultimately, the companies that can retain customers early on and keep the frustration of complex technology delivery invisible to the end-user stand the best chance for succeeding at the Triple Play over the long term.
StarTek (www.startek.com) is a leading provider of business process outsourced services with 18 operating facilities in the U.S and Canada. StarTek works closely with clients to develop and implement solutions for customer care, technical support, receivables management, complex process management, and packaging and fulfillment. The company serves clients in the telecommunications and computer software fields, as well as numerous other industries such as consumer products, cable TV and entertainment.
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