Quality
not Quantity
©
Vanilla Plus – April 2007 – Mark Dye
Trying
to please everyone at the same time has never been an easy
task. Customer choice has grown rapidly in the telecoms sector
and churn has escalated. Companies often fail to recoup the
cost of winning a customer before losing them. One of the
main tools to tackle the issues of churn is the ability of
the service provider to have a 360 degree view of the customer.
The use of integrated customer relationship management and
billing platforms is just one way of doing this as it allows
easy access to complete records of customer usage and preference,
usually showing the status of the relationship.
Although
“creating” a problem may be one way to demonstrate customer
care, there are definitely much more effective ways. Creating
and offering innovative services, flexible pricing packages
and first-rate customer care are all excellent ways of doing
this. Such systems are slowly getting into place to enable
service providers to provision, guarantee and measure service
quality, according to Fergus O' Reilly, director of product
marketing, Highdeal. “For example in WiMAX you can have different
streams of traffic running in parallel to the same customer
site with different levels of QoS per stream”, he says.
“It
makes sense to expose this potential for differentiation to
subscribers. For example, in a home business a parent can
decide to switch on guaranteed bandwidth and low latency for
video conferencing while their teenage daughter upstairs gets
only "best effort" service for her IM and YouTube streams.
"
Of
course, consumers and businesses are willing to pay supplements
for guaranteed quality, but they also expect refunds when
quality does not meet agreed levels. This, says O' Reilly,
requires interconnecting the QoS provisioning and measurement
systems with the pricing, rating and billing systems. "The
most innovative operators are starting to do just that because
it provides upside revenue opportunities and an honest way
to handle network and application outages, " he adds.
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