 | Issue: | Asia-Pacific I 2008 |
| Article no.: | 12 | |
| Topic: | Countless connections, a single experience | |
| Author: | Alfred Mockett | |
| Title: | Chairman & CEO | |
| Organisation: | Motive, Inc | |
| PDF size: | 204KB |
About author
Alfred Mockett is the Chairman and CEO of Motive, Inc. His career in technology and telecommunications spans more than 30 years, working in both private and public companies. Prior to joining Motive, Mr Mockett served as Chairman and CEO of American Management Systems Inc. a consulting and professional services company acquired in 2004 by the CGI group. Before AMS, Mr Mockett served on the Executive Committee of BT in a range of divisional capacities, including CEO of BT Ignite, BT’s international broadband data and applications services business. Prior to this role, Mr Mockett led BT’s consolidation of its international activities under BT Worldwide. He has also held executive positions at Memorex Telex and General Computer Systems Inc. Mr Mockett graduated with honours from the University of London with a degree in Natural Sciences.
Article abstract
As the number and complexity of connected devices, customers and services multiplies, the challenge of delivering a seamless and consistent customer experience has grown apace. Over half of home networking devices purchased are returned to retailers – customers couldn’t figure out how to make them work. Customer experience once meant doing damage control when something had gone wrong. Today, it’s about delivering a consistent, seamless experience across all services and networks. It’s about understanding customers needs and simplifying their lives.
Full Article
The world is well on its way to becoming one global, connected universe where anyone, anywhere can connect to the Internet to communicate and share information. By the year 2010, there will be more than 400 million broadband households worldwide. In that same time frame, those households will have installed nearly one billion connected devices. Whether it’s via coax, twisted pair, satellite feed or wireless network, broadband and mobile data services are reaching into every corner of the world, connecting people from Venezuela to Saskatchewan. While in some parts of the world broadband access is a given, in developing countries the number of broadband subscribers is still multiplying rapidly. For example, Morocco experienced more than a hundredfold increase in broadband adoption from 2002 to 2005. In the same period, Malaysia grew its broadband subscriber base from 19,300 to more than 490,000. The Indian government, in a joint initiative with Alcatel-Lucent, has announced a goal of connecting seven million citizens via WiMax technology, bringing its total number of broadband subscribers to 20 million within three years. This is good news for the planet, since opening the lines of communication is always the first step to resolving differences and spurring economic and cultural progress. If we wish to solve difficult global challenges, we must first create the connections that allow the free exchange of ideas and promote understanding. Yet it takes more than technology to create a global community. As the sheer number of connected devices, customers and services continues to multiply, delivering a simple, seamless and consistent customer experience across any device or network has proven one of the most urgent and significant challenges technology and service providers face. The problem is that, even on its own, each of these devices and services has grown incredibly complex. Cell phones are loaded with features that most customers never use, and the new smart phones are six times more costly to support than traditional handsets. Set-top boxes are morphing into media servers. Home networks today are beginning to rival small businesses in number of computers and associated peripherals. Even gaming consoles are becoming much more powerful and complex. Of course, each of these devices comes with its own thick user manual, software and unique service issues. Until now, providers have had basically two choices in dealing with this complexity – shift the burden to customers, or shift it to their front-line employees. We’ve all experienced the frustration that results when we can’t find the answers we need, when and where we need them. Since front-line employees are a service provider’s closest link to its customers, shifting the burden to them doesn’t solve the problem, it just creates more confusion and frustration on both ends of the phone or Internet connection. In the race to deliver the next new thing, we often lose this larger perspective and our sense of what consumers should and will tolerate. After all, the majority of mainstream, mass-market consumers – no matter what part of the world they reside – are seldom the tech-savvy early adopters willing and able to navigate the complexities inherent in so many new technology devices and services. In fact, research indicates that mainstream consumers feel as though they have been forced to learn more about computer, home network and broadband technology than they ever wanted to know. This is not news to service or technology providers. For example, it’s a well-documented fact that up to half of home networking devices purchased are returned to retailers with no trouble found. The customers simply couldn’t figure out how to make them work. It’s not just consumers that benefit from simplicity. When a provider introduces a new service to millions of customers, making that service easy to consume and use, this lowers costs and reduces the support burden. With so much at stake, you would think that making these services simpler to purchase, use and manage would be, well, simple. Yet the fact is there are quite a few forces at work conspiring to make it extremely difficult. Not too long ago, services such as broadband voice and IPTV didn’t exist. Today, more than 37 million households have an active VoIP service, and by the year 2010, 80 million households will subscribe to an IPTV service. Adding to this connected universe is a whole new world of mobility. The market for smartphones capable of handling both voice calls and data services grew at a rate of 75 per cent last year over 2005, and Gartner predicts worldwide sales of these devices will reach 280 million by 2009. Inevitably, these markets and devices have been moving toward convergence. Virtually every major broadband provider in the world today has a wireless division. In one telling study, nearly half of consumers interviewed said they were prepared to change their broadband provider in order to get a converged fixed-mobile service, and roughly the same percentage would move to a new mobile provider to get it. Of course, many in the industry say these changes are still more hype than reality. It may be true that, for now, the traditional PSTN network is still king when it comes to sheer volume of voice traffic carried every day, and that broadcast TV still rules the viewing experience, but make no mistake, the changes happening are real and are already transforming the communications landscape. The important point is that, whether or not you define it as triple play, quad play or convergence, more and more consumers around the globe are living a connected lifestyle – both at home and on the go. As broadband continues to penetrate the mainstream market, and gain traction in rural and developing areas, more and more consumers will demand easier access to their photos, music, email, video, games and text messages from whatever device, wherever they happen to be in at the time. In short, they’ll want simplicity. Today, unfortunately, managing services and content across all these disparate devices and networks is still anything but convenient. Many providers around the world have already invested billions in building new network infrastructures to ensure the quality and reliability of their next-generation services. Building the infrastructure, however, is just the beginning. To make new services successful, providers must also focus on making the experience simpler, easier, better. For mainstream customers, an easy, consistent, personalized experience across all of their services and devices, and throughout the entire service lifecycle – from the moment they purchase and install it to ongoing maintenance and upgrades – is the key deciding factor in how they evaluate the provider’s brand value. A few providers are heeding the call; they recognise that the service experience is more crucial than ever to driving customer acquisition and building long-term loyalty. They understand that it’s the experience that will determine whether their customers purchase these new digital services, and whether they continue to do business with the company or look elsewhere. Of course, delivering that experience is easier said than done, especially when there are dozens of different hardware components, software applications, devices and partners added into the equation. There is nothing simple about provisioning, managing and supporting new services in this complex scenario. Delivering the customer experience It takes a fundamental shift in how you think about the customer experience. Specifically, it means accomplishing two significant goals: First: manage the entire customer experience, from end to end. Second: make it seamless across all your services, networks and devices. What do we mean by an end-to-end experience? As an industry, when we used to talk about the customer experience, we meant technical support. Specifically, we meant fixing a problem after something had already gone wrong – a customer’s connection had gone down, or a device wasn’t working properly and then doing damage control. Today, managing the customer experience involves much more than that. It begins the moment a customer first encounters a service, from purchase through installation and ongoing use. It’s not just about fixing problems anymore; it’s about designing a great experience into the service from the ground up. It’s about making the service more compelling and the experience memorable – not how fast you solve problems – and about offering simplicity and ease of use. As you hear and read about strategies for delivering next-generation communications services, keep in mind what that really means. The next generation of services is not about VoIP or IPTV or FMC or any other acronym you can think of. It’s not about 3G networks or fibre to the curb. It’s about delivering a consistent, seamless experience across all of those services and networks. It’s about meeting the expectations of the millions of customers waiting for someone to understand their needs and simplify their lives.
