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According to a survey conducted by telecom research house Heavy Reading and sponsored by Alcatel-Lucent, communications service providers are committing ever-increasing budgets to improving the customer experience in an effort to distinguish themselves from competitors.
The survey indicates that service providers are extremely interested in understanding the experiences that their customers have with various products and services, so that any problems can be corrected and customer loyalty can be improved.
The survey, which was conducted in collaboration with Alcatel-Lucent’s Market and Consumer Insight (MCI), quantifies and ranks the elements service providers deem most important in the area of customer experience management (CEM) and incorporates the feedback from key CEM decision makers at 75 service providers around the world.
Caroline Chappell, senior analyst, Heavy Reading said â€Å“Service providers are looking at customer experience management to differentiate in an increasingly crowded and competitive market.
They are all approaching CEM from different starting points, however, and typically find it difficult to implement it in a holistic, differentiated way.
Our survey results have yielded a rich stream of insights into service provider CEM, particularly around their specific reasons to invest in CEM.'
Some interesting outcomes of the study include: Customer experience management will be an area of focus and investment for service providers in 2013, with two-thirds of respondents expecting to increase next year’s expenditures in this area; Service providers view CEM as strategic, with more than three-quarters of respondents indicating that improved CEM provides an opportunity to attract new business, two-thirds agreeing that it could improve their brand image and nearly six-in-ten confident that it will provide competitive differentiation; and potential barriers to CEM implementation, more than half listed difficulty in securing cross-organizational cooperation and almost half of respondents saw poor data quality as the second-to-top barrier.
Greg Owens, senior marketing director, Customer Experience Solutions (CXS) at Alcatel-Lucent said 'One thing that jumped out to me is how serious service providers are about understanding the experiences that their customers have with various products and services, so that any problems can be corrected and customer loyalty can be improved.'