Contact Center Solutions Featured Article

Customer churn is one of the biggest issues facing companies in highly competitive industries such as communications, requiring suppliers i.e. communication service providers to spend huge sums in acquisition costs to retain let alone grow revenues. The math is very simple: the fewer customers turned over the greater the profits. The key lies in knowing the customers, their needs and wants, and meeting them promptly, consistently and professionally.

 

Tools such as Comverse’s Business Support System’s customer management system have been identified in a recently published study by Telesperience, a U.K.-based telecom analyst firm as an important means of reducing churn.

 

Telesperience had surveyed different types of CSPs worldwide to find out their challenges and objectives concerning customer management. Traditionally, this area has been associated with it says “customer care” and “customer relationship management,” but it has been increasingly extended to other activities affecting the overall customer experience, such as ordering, billing, payment, sales and marketing.

 

The most pressing issue cited by the analyst firm was a lack of customer management consistency across channels, primarily caused by multiple legacy business systems not “talking” with each other to present one view of the customer. According to 75 percent of the CSPs, this created a sub-optimal customer experience, which is driving customer churn.

 

Comverse addresses these issues with the Comverse ONE Billing & Active Customer Management solution, a comprehensive BSS built around a single data model and product catalog that offers a complete, real-time view of customer and product data across an operator's network. The solution’s unified architecture enables operators to leverage an ‘Active Customer Management’ approach to manage all customers consistently and in a real-time, interactive manner, regardless of how the customer chooses to pay for services or interacts with the CSP.

 

“Legacy customer management infrastructure was designed for a different business paradigm and now inhibits CSPs from meeting their customers’ expectation,” says Teresa Cottam, Research Director at Telesperience. “Ignoring the problem and bolting on additional systems is increasingly becoming not viable.

 

“By moving towards convergent customer management, CSPs improve their ability to deliver optimal and consistent customer management, targeted marketing, competitive differentiation and growth enablement while also minimizing their costs. As a result, we see a strong trend developing for more and more CSPs to implement convergent customer management systems, such as the Comverse ONE Billing and Active Customer Management solution.”

 

“The Telesperience study serves to underscore Comverse's unique approach to helping CSPs deliver an optimal customer experience,” said Gabriel Matsliach, president of Global Products and Operations at Comverse.