Customer Experience in the 3G—4G Era

Despite the increasing complexity of devices, rising number of services being extended to a maturing and growing spectrum, deriving customer experience is not only significant but also achievable

The Indian telecom story is spectacular not just for the impressive double-digit growth it has witnessed but more importantly for the inclusive growth that it has enjoyed. Declining service rates and rising consumer bases have contributed immensely in making this telecom revolution reach over 543.20 million Indians (as per TRAI Nov 09 estimates). With the commencing of the much-awaited 3G auctions there is much excitement and exhilaration that this revolution will now spill into every nook and corner of the economy. Richer content driven services on account of higher data transit speeds could completely rewrite the norms of functioning for important lifeline sectors like banking, education, and medicine among others. Mobile-to-mobile money transfers, for instance, could make important banking services just a click away for many who've never had the privilege to the most rudimentary of financial institutional offerings. On the other hand an 'anywhere-anytime' access to online libraries on mobile phones could create new breakthroughs in bringing education within the reach of aspiring students in the remotest of regions of the country.

A huge deluge of VAS and mostly data centric service offerings will evidently back this plethora of new possibilities. Translating these service offerings into benefits for the masses requires the consumer to understand each offering to the extent of making a purchase and consequently continuing with the product. Through all stages of the product's use, right from its purchase to selection of a payment scheme to customer care, driving customer experience is imperative for its successful adoption.

Customer experience broadly relates to (but is not confined to) four major areas — purchase, customer care, choice of services backed by roll out time and billing.

The first significant aspect of consumer experience begins with an interface a consumer initiates with a service provider for a purchase. This, in most emerging economies is usually through a store visit. However in the wake of ever increasing number of service offerings that may range from access to news updates, to movies to banking transactions to ERP tools to online Music to astrological services to mobile gaming, a systematic purchase process is mandatory. Taking the entire buying process online is one of the fastest and most effective ways of facilitating a paradigm shift in the way telephony services are sold. Online buying has undoubtedly been in existence for a while but has still not become the preferred mode of transaction despite the large number of benefits. Online stores for example can provide a consumer with a streamlined view of all that is available. Telecom 2.0 tools can assist with monitoring and understanding consumer's shopping (online store surfing experience) and thus customizing online tools to making the entire process even quicker and hassle free. Over and above the ease of making a purchase, an online store also provides a consumer with the necessary comparison tools that ensure selection of the best deal. Further, with internet reaching most mobile phones and electronic transactions expected to be within the reach of over 3 billion adults as per a Gartner report in January, 2010, online stores can do away with the constraints of time and location like never before. Finally, getting a consumer online costs a fraction (one third to be precise) of what it would take to get a customer at a store thus providing huge scope for cost cutting and passing on the cost advantage to the consumer.

The market today offers great online store infrastructure that is capable of making a world of a difference to consumer buying experience. Classic example of such an online success is the App Store. When Apple launched its iPhone® and iPod® Touch mobile devices in July 2008, few people would have believed that in less than a year, the online store would see its billionth app sold. Service provides today therefore need to en-cash on this digital online experience and deploy online store tools after a thorough understanding of the needs of the target audience. More importantly Service providers must enter the mobile app store market before they risk becoming obsolete.

Moving on to the next aspect of consumer experience i.e. customer care and support, it may rightly be concluded that this area has gained much attention with the coming in of the next generation of communication services. This entry a more advance level of services will be backed by phones offering a multitude of advanced capabilities, ranging from the use of bandwidth-hungry applications such as email to Internet and video messaging. In fact as per industry estimates the total number of smart phone users is expected to touch 100 million by 2013. Though such devices not only extend to consumers a host of services and offer service provides new avenues of revenue generation; they do have a major flip side to them. These devices create a number of challenges pertaining to higher device-related support costs and longer query call handling times particularly around the configuration of new applications and services. Such configuration issues may further lead to unnecessary device returns as customers incorrectly mistake an inability to configure the phone themselves with a fault in the handset. These returns usually happen through walk-ins to retail and high street stores — often the site where the device was originally purchased. It may also lead to the service provider's call center being swamped with configuration queries — which at worst will lead to customer frustration, and ultimately churn. Another aspect of this issue is the huge hurdles it may pose in terms of penetration to lower sections of society where figuring out compatibility issues may take even larger dimensions.

The need of the hour is therefore to computerize the entire configuration process to the maximum possible extent. The market once again offers customer care support solutions to address compatibility and configuration related customer support. Solutions in the market ensure that a customer query is first dealt with a computerized interface that combines pre recorded data made available with information being provided by the consumer during the course of the call. The response time to a query is evidently far lower as compared with what a customer care executive would take. Finally, this kind of an interface nowadays also comes equipped with the ability to rectify quite a few compatibility issues without elevating the query to level of customer care. This thus spares the customer a long waiting period, immense dissatisfaction and keeps the service provider's rising expenses at bay.

The next area of customer experience pertains to the availability of the variety of service offerings and the roll out time so involved. With ever declining ARPUs, despite a growing consumer base and provision of newer services sustaining in the market may be extremely difficult with out raising consumption levels. Dealing with this situation requires a deep understanding of usage patterns and network availability. This information and network management could ensure a variety of schemes and differential ratings for services. For instance network available in periods beyond peak hours could be effectively dedicated to allowing a particular industry vertical (like education or the health sector) to provide services. It could also be simply be used to provide services to consumers at lower rates thus allowing service benefits to reach a larger base. Over and above this it also ensures revenue to the service provider, which would not have been the case if there was one uniform rate extended for all periods. Introduction of schemes is one aspect but the roll out time involved with each of them is equally pivotal. In a fiercely competitive landscape dominated by a huge prepaid customer base and known for its tariff wars, a delay in roll out of a particular scheme could easily result in high churn.

The market once again offers massive technological support that ensures close monitoring of network and usage patterns to provide relevant data for possible new consumer schemes. It further assists with a quick rollout of service offerings to make the gap between consumer demand and supply as miniscule as possible.

The final leg of consumer experience is billing. With a variety of services being extended to a customer base across various classes there is huge scope to innovate on the billing front. Billing for example can be done as per the session duration or the volume of data. Delving further one could bill a flat rate or could charge for content, as will be the case in bundled services. Also in case of pre paid consumer billing mostly relates to recharging. Using a single, real-time process flow for both prepaid and postpaid scenarios can go a long way in enabling service providers to improve charging performance and reducing hardware requirements for convergent charging operations.

From the consumer perspective this ensures a glitch free 'anywhere anytime recharge' as well as real-time services such as usage notifications to postpaid subscribers for better insight into individual data consumption.

In a nutshell, despite the increasing complexity of devices, rising number of services being extended to a maturing and growing spectrum, deriving customer experience is not only significant but also achievable. Time and again service providers have realized that consumer experience is crucial in achieving penetration and sustaining in the market especially in a competitive environment where each new offering is extended by all others within short periods. In such a scenario of similar products at similar prices it is undisputedly consumer experience that can make all the difference. It is thus extremely important to understand this need and acquire necessary support and infrastructure to make it a possibility.

By Anshoo Gaur, GM and Head of Amdocs India

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