Released: Thursday, August 13, 2015
In today’s hyper competitive telecom marketplace the topic of Customer Experience Management
(CEM) is gaining prominence every day. The customary brand loyalty associated with the traditional
way of doing business had to give way to disruptive forces like customer in control attitude,
aggressive pricing battles, quad-play bundles attractiveness, carrier billing etc. far and wide.
With a vast array of choices customers today in many instances don’t even blink twice before
porting out. According to Gartner, one bad experience increases the chance of jumping the ship
by 89% whereas a positive experience increases the chance of a recommendation by 58%.
Another study, by Arthur D. Little, showed that a one percentage point increase in the Customer
Satisfaction Index leads to a 2.9 percent increase in ARPU and to a 3.2 percent decrease in
churn in the mobile telecom sector.
Telecom operators have taken cognizance of the ever-increasing significance of providing a
superior experience to customers and are channelizing efforts to enhance customer experience
and move from a network centric to customer centric ecosystem. The efforts have been of different
magnitude leading to varying results for various operators primarily due to the following reasons:
>> Telecom operators’ understanding of the nuances of ‘Holistic Customer Experience
Management’ and associated benefits
>> CEM Transformation Approach followed and Benefits Realization
>> Buy-in of the need for CEM internal cross-organizational transformation and ownership
TM Forum has laid down the guiding principles of holistic CEM (Holistic e2e Customer Experience
Framework (TR149). TM Forum has also recommended a Customer Experience Maturity Model
(GB962) which provides organizations a means to assess their maturity across key defining
factors of customer experience. A holistic CEM approach differentiates itself from traditional
CEM by incorporating its strong technology expertise, background in the managed services
areas and the insights gained from extensive research conducted with customers.
This business paper provides a practical viewpoint on the framework which telecom operators
should adopt while undertaking the CEM transformation journey. The paper also expounds on
the business benefits of a CEM transformation program with illustrative case-studies. The CEM
transformation methodology has been designed and recommended based on the strong
engagement experience in CEM domain. TM Forum’s principles of holistic CEM and CEM maturity
framework have been referred to along with some industry reports while recommending the
transformation approach.
