How can CVM complement CRM to advance the CX goals of Telcos?
By : Gaurav Bajaj
Senior Manager - Corporate & Product Marketing
The new generation of customers, especially the Millennials demand for personalized experiences and services. All B2C marketers are faced with the challenge of meeting this customer aspiration, where experiences need to be tailored to each individual customer’s persona and momentary needs. Telcos are no exception. With almost 100% mobile penetration, tight price regulations, growth of OTT platforms, and stagnant revenues, the need for Telcos to improve Customer Experience (CX) and loyalty is more than ever.
Increased focus on CX
A recent NYU study stated that customer churn typically costs around $65 million per month for large tier Telcos in US. On the other hand, according to Forrester’s CX Index scoring system, telcos that increase CX scores by one point generate an additional $3.39 incremental revenue per-customer. Hence Telcos are emphasizing on customer-centric marketing strategies and measures to improve CX across all touch points and front end applications of sales, marketing and customer service.
Seeing this market need, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) vendors targeting large and mid-market Telcos like Oracle, SAP, Servicenow and Creatio are bringing together their customer-facing applications all into one umbrella of CX cloud. Some of them are clearly are having a vertical focus too; offering packaged solutions for Telecom, BFSI and other industries.
CRM is not enough to ride CX wave
CRM solutions are designed to manage specific activities of different stages of customer lifecycle – like generating leads, converting leads to customers and then handling of customer service requests and grievances. Many CRM vendors claim to offer an integrated suite of applications to automate sales, marketing and service workflows; but again with the goal of acquiring customers and improving sales and service efficiency. Hence they are more transactional in nature and only focus on the current state of the customer. They neither record customers’ past behavior nor predict their needs.
CRM systems provide only a partial view of customer’s demographic, behavioural and other attributes; which is not enough to influence customer relationship and value continuously especially in industries where usage decides value. More over in this digital world where new touch points are getting created frequently, it becomes necessary for any system to have new touchpoint integration capabilities beyond the traditional ones like email. Last but not the least, CRM systems also lack in creating decisions and actions on the fly depending on the context of a customer, which is absolutely essential for Telcos to achieve their vision of making every moment matter in the digital era.
CVM is a critical cog to the CX Marketing wheel
While considering which technology is the right option to drive a successful CX strategy Telcos needs to look for some key features that will help you select the right Customer Value Management (CVM) system for your telecom CX program.
- The system should help in creating a more unified view of customer by bringing in both offline and online data from a myriad of internal and external sources without any coding effort. The system should have the capability of performing usage metrics computation and aggregation for analysing customer’s usage behavior dynamics better.
- The platform should have advanced AI/ML capabilities to derive actionable intelligence from customer’s CRM data and more importantly usage/transaction data that can feed into not only marketing systems but also other front end applications like sales or customer service like churn propensity scores or next best offer recommendation or product affinity scores.
- The system should support contextual marketing i.e. it should be able to capture customer signals in real-time and then respond too with a highly relevant marketing action under a second.
- The system should be able to enable an Omni channel customer engagement journey seamlessly with out of the box support for both traditional and digital touchpoints.
Bringing CRM and CVM together
To launch a full-fledged successful CX program the Telcos need to partner with vendors who can offer a solution that can unify their customer interactions across front end touch points and applications so that they can provide a consistent personalized experience. Also having a single source of truth regarding customer data and intelligence derived from it is critical to make CX truly unique, differentiated, personalized and more importantly value-driven.
