Amit Sanyal, Assistant Vice President & Joint Head, Consumer Value Solutions business, Mahindra Comviva shares his views on why Customer Experience Management is becoming increasingly relevant today. Excerpts
1. Why, in your opinion, has Customer Experience Management come into the limelight?
This refers to the telecom space. From this perspective, one has to look at the current status, peppered with some perspective from recent history. In most countries, the telecom ecosystem, at least the operator sides of the ecosystem moved from being a green-field, land grab opportunity to being fiercely competitive to being mature today. The handset was the biggest entry barrier for the user, next came the call rates. Today neither is. Telecom today is a buyers market, used to a sellers one even till a few years back. I am not getting into details of how or why this change happened.
Now that it has, what is the impact?
The customer has choice and the customer is Aware in the true sense.
The customer is always connected or wants to be always connected
Choice has its own problems-it creates clutter. The customer has gone through that phase and now wants or rather demands personalization.
For the operator, it means a shift from deciding what experience it wants its customers to get, to finding ways to give a different experience to a customer
A demanding customer represents an opportunity. If I can understand each customer, I can also communicate with each customer better. If I can understand the customers intent, I can convert that into a purchase of a product from my portfolio of services.
The best service that a customer expects is NO service. The best customer service for me is if I do not need to call customer service.
A competitive market ensures that call rates / access rates, etc are similar. The only differentiator in the customers mind is the Quality of Experience. Does my service provider understand me?
With all these, the erstwhile Customer Experience Management (CEM) paradigm is no longer relevant. Today, the world is moving to CXM where the experience part is for each touch point where the customer interacts with the service provider when making or receiving calls / accessing Internet / getting a query, request or complaint placed or resolved or making a purchase of an additional service. Even till recently experience used to be interchangeably used with quality which then narrowed down to the quality of the network experience only.
Customer Value Management today is the key. Times have changed.
2. What are a few key global CXM practices and can they be replicated here? Why or why not?
While so much is being written and spoken about CEM / CXM, practically this still is in a very nascent stage. There are credible initiatives done globally but you must understand that CEM is not a boxed solution. Things done elsewhere cannot and more appropriately should not be replicated as is. Each geography is different and even within a geography the preferences of customers which an operator has vary greatly with those of another in the same region. It depends heavily on whether an operator has the early mobile adopters or the Gen X or generally class agnostic users as its customers.
The need therefore for an operator is to have a solution from a provider with whom they can work together (and not expect a solution in a box!) to arrive at the best possible CXM use cases suited for the customers it has.
We at Mahindra Comviva do just that. While there are solution boundaries, the final mechanics of what fits best for a particular Operators is worked out together. We believe in long term partnerships and not a typical vendor-customer relation.
3. What are the portfolios key pillars? Who will be your target audience?
Let me simplify this forget about the pillars what does the solution promise?
Helps sell more to the same set of customers
Helps keep customers longer on the network
These are two simple promises that form the bed-rock of Comvivas CXM solution.
Effectively, in granular terms the solution promises a move from
