Livewire: The Communications, Media and Entertainment Blog: Telecom convergence and customer centricity

The maxim about the customer being king has never been as relevant as in today’s telecom environment. To win the battle for growth, Communication Services Providers (CSPs) are gearing their cultures toward putting customers’ needs first. CSPs are becoming customer-centric, molding operations to answer client needs and offering an unmatched communications experience to foster loyalty and reduce customer churn. Couple this with the converged landscape of telecom industry, customer centricity in a converged telecom set-up has the potential to be a game changer.

Convergence of services is revolutionizing the communications industry, driving the investment of billions of dollars on network and service development efforts by CSPs. Convergence offers CSPs a tremendous business opportunity by allowing them to exceed customer expectations through state-of-the-art, personalized communication services. Thus, the CSPs are keen to grow and retain their customer base and increase average revenue per user (ARPU) by rolling out next-generation products and services.

With customer centricity driving all key activities in the management of a customer’s Life Cycle, what are the key areas the CSPs need to focus on? Here are a few:

· Understand customer needs better (location, context and situation)

· Provide the customers the flexibility they require

· Give them the control to manage the services they use (with a customer-centric view).

The need of the hour is to recognize the strategic imperative of "customer centricity" as it holds the key to unlock the customer lifetime value!