Douglas Gilstrap: Service providers will gain advantages by
transforming from network centric to customer centric operations
                             
                         
We have reached a turning point. Breathtaking progress in digital technologies and connectivity has expanded into more areas of society and business. Over the coming years, this rate of expansion will continue to increase and create innovation opportunities across industries, public services and in private life. We call this emerging era the networked society. To get there, Ericsson is working with telecom operators, selected industry verticals and other players across the M2M value chain using mobile broadband capabilities and assets with innovative technology to deliver sustainable business models.
Connectivity and wide coverage has enabled people to communicate in ways we hadn’t envisioned. It has also created the demand for elevated customer experience through personalized, high quality services that enable not only work but also social networking - anywhere, anytime.
The prices of smartphones, laptops and all other types of connected devices are declining, making them affordable for more people around the world and enabling them to participate in the networked society. The network that once was used for mobile phones communicating via voice and text messages is now being used for multimedia streaming, new services and expanding M2M technology, all of which create a lot more data traffic in the networks. 
                        
                        
Customer centric mode of operation 
                        
When you take all of this into account it becomes clear that the user experience including quality of connectivity and differentiated services become key. Service providers will gain advantages by transforming from network centric to customer centric operations. Mobile broadband coverage itself will not be the differentiator but the combination of superior performance networks and the understanding of the targeted customers’ behavior, demand and experience will.
The customer experience is by its nature a personal one that includes the many ways people communicate with the world around them. Managing this experience includes how the operators handle the services value chain – from finding a service to using it and, at the end, paying for it. Having a customer experience management framework and its adherent customer lifecycle helps operators to better understand and meet user needs at each customer touch point. At the highest level, the lifecycle consists of: 
                        
• Find – enhancing market awareness, proposition targeting and promotion relevance
• Get - making purchases smooth and enjoyable
• Setup – efficient and seamless provisioning of the purchased service
• Use – ensuring that the offering needs in terms of functionality and quality are met and that the customers are fully using the services available to them
• Pay for – providing simple, clear and convenient means to balance the customer’s account
• Get Help – enhancing the experience customers receive when using customer care channels
• Modify – flexibility to easily modify the contract and service levels as a consequence of changed customer need or churn management activity 
                        
For operators it can be difficult to know where to get started and what to prioritise since each operator as well as customer has different needs and market conditions that require an individually adapted change process. Since there are many ways to address the different parts of the customer lifecycle, service providers should define a customer experience management strategy based on business objectives and customer understanding, that can justify the business value of the investments before investing.
At Ericsson, a key lesson we have learnt is that the tools and the architecture, including required data models, come last after the operational process and organisational aspects are defined. By taking a holistic approach starting with the business objectives, turning it into a customer management strategy and mapping that against processes and organization, we ensure we have, from day one, customer touch points and operational aspects as the drivers. Using this method we do not have limitations embedded in the transformational thinking, limitations based on lack of functionality or other limitations in various tools that define the processes and the organisation.
When defining the customer experience management strategy, key target areas, segments and offerings must be identified together with the customer lifecycle needs across customer channels for the key target segments. Which of those needs are the ones that should be prioritised and which levers can be used to improve the customer experience? 
                        
Key questions to consider are:

• Where and how do you consolidate the single customer view to achieve improved customer experience?
• What order of priority do you give to different opportunities and threats, or both?