Future Telco Profits Will Depend on Emerging CEM Tools

[prnewswire] Network operators will increasingly have to rely on customer experience management (CEM) initiatives to maximize subscriber retention and service profitability, a development that will place more importance on ensuring customer satisfaction, rather than just delivering advanced services, according to the latest report from Heavy Reading Services Software Insider, a paid research service of TechWeb's Light Reading.

Beyond CRM: Customer Experience Management identifies and analyzes the new technology ecosystem developing around the CEM concept for network operators. The all-new, 33-page report evaluates the category of customer intelligence (CI) systems emerging in the CEM sector, based on technology used to provide operational intelligence (OI), a branch of business analytics. The report profiles 13 leading suppliers in the emerging network operator CEM market.

"CEM covers a wide range of activities and, like all such buzzwords, is very loosely defined at this stage of its development," says Caroline Chappell, research analyst with Heavy Reading Services Software Insider and author of the report. "Telco CEM is primarily focused on the customer experience of services as the operator delivers them. The more an operator understands about the customer's experience as it occurs, the more it can align the customer's expectations of that experience with its delivery."

CEM is most critical for operators in mature markets where churn is costly, revenues are flattening, and new technologies and services are having a serious impact on network capacity, Chappell notes. "The quality of the customer experience is seen as key to customer loyalty and willingness to buy additional services," she says. "It will also be a critical consideration for third-party partners using telcos as a channel to market for their services."

Key findings of Beyond CRM: Customer Experience Management include:

* CEM requires an ecosystem of vendors to support the customer experience of the service provider, rather than just the experience of the individual service.
* CEM adoption will be essential for network operators to move beyond their conventional business models and into the emerging Telco 2.0 service environment.
* Early specialists in telco CEM tools will see stiff competition from IT vendors and from big suppliers of analytics tools, such as IBM and SAP.
* Vendors with multiple CEM-related products are struggling to articulate a coherent strategy that ties them together.

Future Telco Profits Will Depend on Emerging CEM Tools, Heavy Reading Reports