Few would argue the idea that the customer is king; and, these kings are becoming even more powerful as providers focus on market share to ride out the recession. Operators are relying on ARPU gains to achieve better-than average market growth in the recovery period. Throughout this transition, providers are making strategic investments to improve the customer experience and therefore better position themselves to achieve short-term and long-term market and financial performance gains.
These include reducing operational costs and adding customers in near-saturated markets, avoiding churn (particularly for lifetime “value” customers), accelerating penetration across product lines, and driving increased revenue per customer and customer lifetime value.
To be successful, organizations must first understand how customers transact and traverse across the large, complex order-to-cash process, from marketing programs through to billing, customer care and field service. This is where the customer lives, and where the strength – or lack of strength – of the provider’s entire order-to-cash process can either enhance or erode the customer experience.
Toward Better Analytics
In an attempt to support these goals, providers have focused on two areas of investment. One is business intelligence software to provide stakeholders and executives with analysis, dashboards, and reports that show the baseline realities and subsequent progress on customer key performance indicators. The other is predictive analytics that use complex algorithms to predict customer behavior and help guide marketing and other programs. Both of these investments have proven their value over time and can provide a meaningful analytic backbone.
However, these capabilities miss a critical factor in what truly shapes the customer experience and actions in the first place.
Process analytics, in this case customer-based process analytics, deliver transaction-by-transaction, root-cause based analytics to determine if the sub-processes and systems that comprise the order-to-cash process are operating optimally, and whether they are supporting or inhibiting the over-arching customer experience goals. They can also provide a more complete view of the implications and value of upstream marketing programs. More specifically, customer-based process analytics focus on three core sets of issues:
- Errors, delays or confusion in the order-to-cash process (e.g., order-to-activation delays, billing errors or unclear marketing programs) that can frustrate customers and cause a negative impact to customer experience.
- Avoidable calls to the call center and sub-optimal call handling processes that can unnecessarily drive up costs while further frustrating customers.
- Sub-optimal revenue management in terms of errors that delay revenue and/or collections, call handling issues prompting excessive customer credits, and marketing programs that negatively impact margins by driving up call volumes without the associated ARPU gains.