Technology is changing how we capture and communicate what matters most to us. Developing film at the drugstore, creating scrapbooks and saving mementos has been turned on its head by a rapid change in technology. We now express our appreciation with how we engage the world through mobile devices, usually a smart phone or tablet.
In the moment we snap a photo, tweet, share on Facebook or send a text, we broadcast our loyalty and dedication to everyone listening. We aren’t just fans of rock stars or athletes anymore, but fans of our favorite brands, companies and the various products they produce.
At the center of this fandom, telecommunication and communication service providers (CSP) have a chance like no other industry to leverage their customer base and turn their customers into fans as well.
The Customer Experience in Telecommunications
CSPs have a unique edge in enhancing the customer experience as our phones are always with us, we touch our mobile provider innumerably more times than any other brands we interact with. At Mobile World Congress (MWC) it was clear that Customer Experience Management (CEM) is becoming a perfect tool for CSPs to embrace the idea of turning customers into fans through their core processes. MWC reminded us just how much the world is highly connected thanks to the little devices in our pockets and that CSPs can dial in to the opportunities their customers are actually begging for.
Cricket Communications Treats Each Customer as an Individual
CSPs, telecommunications, and mobile providers need real-time CEM in order to understand, anticipate, and act on customer behaviors in real time, at all touch points. Cricket Communications is a great example of how back-end processes can be used to improve and actively manage the customer’s experience. Cricket’s goal is to get away from “one sized fits all” treatment of their customers to look at the specifics around customer usage patterns to make personalized offers and mitigate negative experiences. They rely on TIBCO to provide that capability:
“TIBCO doesn’t just do it well functionally, they do it in scale. And they can enable us to do it in scale to meet our customers’ needs.”
— Mike Cassisa, Director of Enterprise Application Integration, Cricket Communications
By ensuring a customer will get the same experience if they walk into a store, log on to the web store, or call in to support, Cricket’s strategy is customer-centric. As a customer, nothing is more annoying than getting different answers from different company touchpoints, complaining to the call center that the guy in the store said something different, which makes us feel lost and unimportant in a sea of other customers. Cricket leverages the event-driven back-end to never let customers feel lost and unimportant, while also not sacrificing the capability to have millions of customers on an enterprise scale.
The value Cricket provides to customers in terms of processing events through self-service initiatives, security and fraud prevention, or extending personalized discounts, is specified service. If usage data shows a customer is having a negative experience, there are rules in place to automatically send alerts down a customized path of action to help mitigate that experience. Cricket believes in the two-second advantage in that if they get the right information to the right place at the right time, they have a competitive advantage.
For a deeper dive on how “Turning Customers Into Fans” can work in business, check out this whitepaper.
