Why aren’t that many good telecom services around?
Are you satisfied with the service provided by your telecom provider? When was the last time when you had a good experience with your telecom service provider? To many, the answers to above questions are: no and never!! This blog attempts to bring an aspect as to why this might be the case.
Let’s go back to basics and discuss what telecom services are used for. In the good old days, there was, and still is, the traditional post delivery service where communication between people and organisations are through the exchange of written materials (e.g. letters). Then came the telephone where speech communication was made possible. As technologies move on, we now have emails, the Internet and mobile technologies. What is the common theme of all of the above? It is the transport of information or data from one place to another. That sounds simple enough. However, in this information age, providing and managing telecom network and technologies to do that are much more complex.
With these complex telecom technologies, the keys for designing an end to end telecom service are: the ability to turn these network technologies into something that the customers want to use; making the customers feel that they are being looked after whilst using the network capabilities; providing the capabilities and tool for the operational personnel to looking after the customers and ensuring that customer payments are collected to make the business viable - all at the same time.
The major difference between Service Design and product development is the concept of providing a service. Designing a service is about providing the capabilities for monitoring and maintaining the service performance and designing the facilities to deliver after sales support. These are much more complicated than designing products that are sold without any maintenance agreement. This is especially important for managed telecommunications services and managed IT solutions, where the service providers are expected to resolve the problems or to fix faults before the customers or end users realise. A good service is supported by well thought through operational processes, well designed support systems as well as good underlying network technologies. The Service Design skill is the expertise to design, create and enable such service supporting functions.
Many companies think that introducing a new piece of technology is the be all and end all of launching a new service. On the contrary, this is only a small part of the equation as demonstrated above. In an increasing competitive telecommunication environment, it is the service that really matters. Having an advanced network technology is no longer enough as customers/ end users have taken the technology for granted and it is the personable service that really makes the difference and enables you to differentiate your services from your competitor.
Introducing new services will also result in introducing changes into the operational environment. This change management concept is not well understood by most. Hence many service introduction programme fails as a result. In summary, telecom services are actually very complex, involving many network technologies, support systems and operational processes as well as managing changes into the operational environment. These principles and the methodologies for designing a service are poorly defined. Many services are cobbled together by people without such appreciation and right skills to do so. Hence there aren’t many great services around.
What is your view on telecom services? Do you feel being served or do you feel that the telecom providers are just selling network capacity? What does service mean to you?
Comments
Sauming Hi,
Managing the service lifecycle from the customer's perspective remains critically important.
Since this article was published back in 2001, I asked myself what has changed. Here's what I think.
Increasingly, new services are being driven by software applications. Whether they reside on your mobile phone, on your IP-enabled television, or on any of your multitude of digital devices and gizmos, it's becoming clear that the future of services lies in applications of every shape and hue.
If you agree with that premise, it then becomes critically important to examine how service providers can dramatically scale their application creation and management capabilities.
This will require fresh strategies, new thinking, new partners, and audacious new business models.
Oh, and lightning speed too.
Commented by: Deepak Swamy | January 5, 2009 12:59 PM
Hi Deepak,
Thank you for your comments. Managing the service lifecycle is indeed critically important. Service lifecycle is a topic on its own. When developing the service, operational metrics (or sometimes known as service KPIs) are defined and measured to help with that process.
Your article on service operations center (SOC) is an interesting one as having the relationships between the network layer and the service is not often done in the Service Provider environment. The service design activities should include such requirements in the OSS system for effective service and customer management. To answer your question ‘what has change’ – very little from a service live cycle management perspective.
I agree that, increasingly, the future for new services is being driven by new applications. The other trend is the personalisation for the services and applications. I believe the profiling of customers and personalisation of services and application are the keys to customer satisfaction and retention. Deepak, I welcome your view on this.
Commented by: Sauming Pang | January 14, 2009 6:33 PM
Nice post. I agree with you about the importance of customer experience and the service wrap. Most operators (at least in mature markets) today recognize this as their strategy to differentiate themselves from competition.
But I think there is a lot of confusion about what makes an excellent service organization? Think about Southwest Airlines that took the meaning of customer satisfaction to a different level.
I think the companies that are exemplary service organizations are the ones that have made great investments in their people, supporting infrastructure and have a deep rooted culture about customer satisfaction among their employees. Unfortunately, this is sorely missing in most telecom operators.
Commented by: Ankur Bhan | February 7, 2009 10:24 PM
The service from network service providers is good given the infrastructure hiccups posed by government spectrum policy. I am talking about India here. However, I think telecom services can provide little value additions which will go a long way to enhance customer experience:
1) Displaying Name with mobile number. Recently Tata Indicom launched blackberry services where they have provided this facility. I fail to understand why other network service providers can't do that.
2) The network service providers can provide paid facility to customers where that can upload their contact details (which they store in phone book/SIM card). The network companies can provide a GPRS interface through which customers can update their contact details information periodically.
This can be very handy if I format my mobile or If I loose my mobile...I have all my contact details with a single click.
3)The network companies should not only enable communication but also upgrade themselves to manage customer's end-to-end communication needs.
Like network service providers can provide me option of scheduled SMSs...I schedule a SMS to be sent to my freind on his birthday.
Commented by: Santosh Singh | February 9, 2009 9:20 AM
Thank you for all your views. As Ankur has said, the companies that excel at customer service have invested heavily in their people and support infrastructure. For most telecommunication providers, however, there is a lack of investment in the right areas for their services. Most service providers’ perception is that investing in network technologies will automatically yield good customer service. It is actually not always the case. Not many providers recognise that it is the support systems, the people and operational processes behind the network technologies that enable the service wraps around the network technologies. Without investments in those areas, creating a good service is going to be very difficult.
With creativity and niche approaches, value added service, will go a long way. Customers nowadays have taken basic technologies for granted. Apart from good customer services, what sticks in customer’s mind is the usability and ‘niftiness’ of the service, esp for mobile applications. It is the customers’ perceived value that counts. In the examples given by Santosh, it is not technically impossible to do, but just require some creative thoughts. In addition, these types of value added service will help to retain the customers. As more information/ service application data is held by the service provider, it will be hard for the customers to move to another. It is often the case that the customers will subscribe to or continue with the service because of these value add services.
Commented by: Sauming Pang | February 10, 2009 3:21 PM
In India, Network service providers provide the option to get the details about the Missed call list from their repository. So we can access our private information from the Network provider, this is a good feature, at the same time we can't store our phonebook details and other details too. If they provide this feature that would be appreciated. Getting private data is technically possible, so network providers can help or introduce a new feature to store the subscribers important information in their repository through the network service.
Commented by: Thiyagarajan | February 12, 2009 6:44 AM