Friday, December 16, 2011

[Infonetics]: CEM - a Vendor's Buzzword?

 
In a post to Tekelec's Blog, Shira Levine (pictured), Directing Analyst, Next Gen OSS and Policy, at Infonetics Research, writes about top trend she saw in 2011 -  customer experience management (CEM)

Shira defines CEM as "is all about understanding how the subscriber wants to interact with his/her CSP and acting accordingly .. And though CEM does indeed have a lot to do with customer care, billing, and service assurance, policy management plays a huge and often underappreciated role".

Then the post post mentions some tiered services ideas - we usually find those in DPI and Policy Management vendors' presentations - such as "sell a movie package that includes four HD movies each month with guaranteed quality of service" or "exempts traffic from social networking sites from monthly quotas".

Great ideas, but as the post acknowledges, this is still a vendor pitch - "Why, then, aren’t more operators deploying these new service plans?".

According to a recent MNO survey by Connected Business Research (also posted today - here) "When it comes to changing billing plans, technology readiness/cost and regulatory considerations are much less important than market perception and competitive considerations" (here). Ms. Levine seems to agree - "the service is no longer about what the network can support, but about what the customer wants".

My bottom line - MNOs will buy the technology and implement new service plans if they can see a clear business case (ROI) for generating more revenues. It seems that they haven’t been convinced yet, beyond the simple models of Usage based Billing that are there also to control Opex.

More here - "Bringing Customer Experience Management From Slideware to Reality" - here.

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