Customer experience is next battleground

It is starting to look as if customer experience (CX) is going to become a key battleground for Pay TV and broadband service providers who are fighting for growth in markets that are reaching maturity. With increased competition and less opportunity for service differentiation, service providers need to maximise ARPU from the customers they have and that places the emphasis on increasing satisfaction with, and use of, existing services and churn reduction. Thus customer experience is becoming a boardroom priority.

We reported last year on the impact that Quality Assurance (QA) can have on a Pay TV business, including greater service reliability and quality, improved and more proactive customer support and reduced churn. A good reputation for service can attract new customers, while also encouraging existing ones to exploit new features and boost ARPU. Reductions in operating cost can also be achieved through avoidance of truck rolls, getting installation right first time, and being better prepared at the call centre to reduce time spent on the phone with customers.

QA and customer experience are closely related and depending on definitions, may encompass similar activities. Alcatel-Lucent has just launched an expanded portfolio of what it is calling CX solutions and they cover the provisioning of new devices, applications and services, management of upgrades and service modifications, monitoring and analytics, and optimisations that make the most from network capacity, like using usage trends to improve yield management as well as loyalty.

QA solutions vendor Agama Technologies has estimated that more than half the users of its monitoring and analysis tools are now non-technical people involved in functions like customer service. This reflects the fact that QA has the potential to improve business processes and contribute to overall profitability. The company believes the impact QA has on the overall health of a service provider TV business should be acknowledged at every level of the organisation, right up to CEO level. And it seems that whether you call it QA or CX, this process of business improvement has, indeed, now reached the boardroom.

The research and consulting company Ovum is in no doubt about the growing importance of CX. Jonathan Doran, Principal Analyst, Consumer, at Ovum says: “CX is as much an imperative as an opportunity for service providers and will become more so going forward. This is an area where many triple-play operators have struggled to deliver, as they become stretched beyond their core competencies, as with cable television operators venturing into broadband access and fixed telephony, or wireline telcos becoming Pay TV service providers.

“We have argued for some time that as fixed broadband and telephony become increasingly commoditized and video content offerings more numerous and hence less differentiated, the competitive battleground is shifting further away from the services per se, and more towards enhancing and optimizing the user experience.”

Doran continues. “In most developed markets, consumers have a choice of at least two triple-play service providers and, while price and content remain crucial purchasing decision criteria, the quality of experience, whether it is from a customer support or service reliability standpoint, can serve as the tipping point.”

Given the rapid growth in multi-screen TV services and the limited opportunity for new revenues associated with them, certainly in the short-term, service providers have a new QA/CX problem to solve. They need to gain visibility of multi-screen services throughout the customer premise, like for video on a PC or tablet. The ability to understand what is happening on the home network is a prerequisite for taking responsibility for it, something broadband providers will probably have to do, whether they want to or not.

Ovum expects broadband providers to get the customer calls if video stops displaying properly on an Apple iPad at home, even if they are not providing the video. According to Clare McCarthy, Practice Leader, Telco Operations at the consulting firm, “In much the same way that a consumer would contact their tour operator about problems with a flight or hotel, a consumer will contact their connectivity provider if they are unable to connect to the network or access a service.

“The assumption is that problems connecting a device to the network or accessing a service running on the network must be a network connectivity issue. Also it is often easier to contact the service provider rather than contact the BBC for iPlayer or Dell for PC problems.”

At Alcatel-Lucent, where the new customer experience solutions are being marketed under the Motive brand name, Ben Geller, Senior Director, Solutions Marketing, draws a parallel to the way broadband providers tried to avoid PC related connectivity issues when residential gateways and Wi-Fi modems started to go mainstream in the middle of last decade.

“The first part of the call script was to get people to unplug the broadband router from the PC,” he recalls. “They did not want to support PC connectivity problems but that approach didn’t work and they realised they had to address the problem even if they had not put the device inside the home. They realised they would get the phone call, not the router manufacturer, and started looking for solutions to deal with it.

“Today, as more and more connected devices are introduced to the home, and there are more applications coming into the home, service providers have to deal with that. What a lot of them have done is create free and premium customer care options. They will help you connect your laptop to the Internet as part of the basic service but will charge if you want to connect a connected TV.”

As well as offering subscription or pay-as-you-go based customer support, which could cover connecting an Apple iPod to the home network in the same way it does a printer, service providers can look to prevent issues in the first place. According to Clare McCarthy: “Increasingly, we see service providers spending more time on installation and set-up to ensure that the equipment they are responsible for is provisioned correctly, but they also offer remote diagnostics, software installed on the desktop, self-care portals and encourage the use of online communities, to help address the wider issues.”