Creating a Corporate Culture to Understand and Improve Customer Experience

“Rethinking Communications; Enabling Connected Life” was the theme for the TM Forum Management World 2012 held in Dublin. The event brought together more than 3500 professionals from more than 80 countries. Gunadjaya Likito, CIO of Smartfren, and Phoung Van Cuong, CEO of Viettel Software, gave speeches at the forum. They shared their views on improving customer experience.

Because of various market and technology pressures, operators are moving from network- and product-centered operation to customer-centered operation. In intensely competitive markets, products, brands, and even services can be imitated. However, the customer experience a company creates is often unique and cannot be easily or quickly replicated. Customers are becoming more critical, and their demands can be so diverse that they are sometimes hard to satisfy. Some customers no longer care only about products and prices; they require benefits and recognition for their loyalty. With the development of smartphones, many new applications and services have emerged. Making good use of these services and maximizing the long-tail effect is a motive for operators to focus on customer experience.

Smartfren is an amalgamation of Smart Telecom and Mobile 8 and is one of the key players in Indonesia’s communication market. The two operators were running CDMA networks in different frequencies and with different platforms and systems. The merger created a big challenge for Smartfren in how to keep and enhance customer experience across the two networks. An IT-domain solution is to adopt a unified policy. Using ZSmart suite supplied by ZTESoft, Smartfren built a unified BSS/OSS platform to replace the two existing ones. One platform now supports the whole enterprise BSS/OSS. The unified BSS/OSS platform has

• unified business process management (BPM) that supports different business process flows (both service fulfillment and assurance flows) inside the enterprise
• unified customer view for centralized management of customer information and relationships
• unified customer contact for keeping customer experience consistent across different channels
• unified product catalogue for centralized product management and flexible cross-bundling
• unified and customized billing for different services. 

Full lifecycle customer care means enhancing customer experience and encouraging loyalty. In the ZSmart solution, the lifecycle of a customer can be divided into customer acquisition, customer service, and customer retention. Each phase entails different strategies and policies. Marketing and maintenance go hand-in-hand to win the customer, enhance satisfaction, and keep the customer's business.

Smartfren is also conceiving an active multichannel marketing platform so that marketing activities are effective and based on facts. The marketing process includes

• customer analysis. A marketing model is built according to business intelligence (BI). Marketing goals are set; segment customers are determined; and predictions are made based on marketing evaluations.
• planning. Target customers, proper service offerings, customer capacity, and business rules are determined.
• optimization. Resources are coordinated and optimized so that the marketing goal can be achieved within budget. Channel capacity is also optimized.
• execution. A marketing campaign can be executed in multiple waves or stages. An event-based marketing campaign is also possible. Such a campaign is based on real-time customer behavior.
• evaluation. The result of a marketing campaign is evaluated with the help of BI. Return of investment also needs to be evaluated. Results of data mining are stored in a knowledge base for future reference.

This whole process helps Smartfren market itself correctly, lower costs, improve accuracy, and reduce customer complaints.

Solving problems on time is also an important part of customer experience. ZTESoft has launched a closed-loop problem handling process to meet this requirement.

Network alarms can be collected from EMSs and are intelligently filtered, compressed, and correlated so that the number of alarms is minimized. When integrated into unified inventory management, root cause analysis can be done to figure out the root cause of a problem. Through a reference to the relationship between customer and resource, a potentially affected customer group can be analyzed, and this information can be used by front-end staff to take preventative action to minimize harm caused by the fault.

The trouble ticketing flow accepts trouble tickets from both the network and customer sides. All trouble tickets are analyzed with the help of an experience base (historical TT database). Each type of trouble ticket is correlated with workflow that is predefined by unified BPM. Trouble tickets are then sent to corresponding teams so that the teams can work on them. When trouble tickets are handled, valuable cases are archived in the experience base for future reference. This closed-loop problem handling greatly enhances efficiency.

How does Smartfren evaluate customer experience? Customers have expectations about the services provided by operators, and operators may provide services of differing quality. There is always a gap between service quality provided by operators and customer expectations. Service quality must meet customer expectations. If service quality fails to meet customer expectations, the customer experience is bad. There must be a bridge between customer expectations and service quality.

Smartfren uses service quality management (ZSmart SQM) based on EMS KPIs. KPIs are usually devised for network element performance but not subjective customer experience. Leveraging traditional SQM, Smartfren will build a new platform that will measure customer and service information and even real-time network signaling data. The new platform will analyze, compute, and model data to monitor customer experience. This will help Smartfren build up a centralized customer experience management center.