Four Tips For Building A Successful CEM Program

According to Jeff Parker, president and co-founder of Monolith Software, Customer Experience Management (CEM) is an emerging field in business that endeavors to improve the sum of all customer experiences with a business by managing from the customer’s perspective. As such, he’s come up with four advanced best practices to assist communications service providers seeking to implement a CEM agenda:

1.  Adopt and Maintain a Proactive Stance
Historically, the telecommunications industry has been in reactive mode with regard to addressing customer service issues. The focus mustshift from the reactive approach – waiting for alerts, events, faults to occur, to a proactive approach – managing the KPIs, KQIs, performance metrics in a realtime and proactive fashion to remediate problems before they become significant. Proactive CEM requires a unified IT infrastructure management solution to address today’s service assurance needs and to empower service providers to manage customer experience management proactively.

2.  Treat Customers as Treasured Assets
Customers are more inclined and empowered to churn than ever before. This, combined with escalating marketing costs and the upward spiral of service complexity, puts service providers on a high-speed road to revenue erosion. The CEM program,when implemented with a unified IT infrastructure management solution, allows communications service providers insight into the end-to-end data necessary to capture customer views of the service experience. These perspectives allow service providers to treat customers as assets, reduce churn, and maximize lifetime value.

3.  Eliminate Siloed Stores of Information
CEM is the sum of all the touch points the service provider has with its customers. Successful CEM programs utilize a single data repository simplifying cross domain correlation. A unified IT infrastructure management tool allows a data normalization approach that can collect, into a unified assurance warehouse, siloed data stores from such operational domains as:

•    Fault
•    Availability
•    Performance
•    Topology
•    Service Level Management (SLM)

4.  Map Service Performance to Actual SLA Commitments
The contractual SLA commitment has become a de facto standard for service providers. In many cases this creates a cart-before-the-horse scenario, where the commitments are there, but there’s not yet a tenable means of reporting that SLAs are met. Utilizing the unified approach enables monitoring and mapping to salient KPI/KQI data, allowing service providers to take preemptive actions and meet service assurance expectations.

Contact Jeff Parker at [email protected].