How can you add value to your customers’ lives? It’s all about improving the user experience. Let’s break it down into three parts:
1. Be Better Than Good
Seth Godin’s number one piece of advice is to offer something unique and “be better than good”. In our industry, this comes down to quality of experience — can you deliver smart bandwidth utilization, flexible service bundles, and fast activation and provisioning? What are you doing to build loyalty?
2. One Screen World
We hear a lot about the multi-screen experience, but according to speaker and author Mitch Joel, really, there’s only one screen that matters — the one right in front of you, right now. Subscribers expect a seamless experience, whether they are on WiFi, or connected to a fixed line network, and regardless of whether they are using the network to stream video or connect to a conference call. As subscribers add even more connected devices to their home networks, it will become more and more complicated for them to manage these networks without technical know-how. Service providers need to have a way to monitor and manage customer premises networks to facilitate easier troubleshooting and reduce truck rolls. Protocols such as TR-069 can assist you with these tasks.
3. Respect the User
By all means, tap into connectivity and the information on your network to personalize the customer experience — just don’t forget to respect the user. This advice from Brian Wong, founder of tech start-up Kiip, cautions against unnecessarily interrupting customers and instead suggests finding ways to build loyalty, even before the purchase. For our industry, I interpret this as finding ways to reduce service downtime and sustain loyalty. It also includes understanding your customer’s needs enough to offer add-ons that relate to a customer’s interests or mirror previous purchases/behaviors (for example, offering limited-time World Cup channel packages to sports fans or increased bandwidth/data caps to top talkers).
Companies like Amazon are already embracing these points, offering add-ons related to customer needs, flexible options, and fast delivery. It’s essential to always be thinking of ways to add value — whether it’s by quickly provisioning subscriber devices, rolling out new services, or managing bandwidth to provide the best possible subscriber experience.