• The one solution you’ll need…
• The answer to all your questions…
• One stop shopping

The silver bullet is a VERY over-used concept in marketing and solution selling.  I honestly don’t believe that there is a single solution for any one set of problems… Then again, I do believe the “80/20” rule applies and you can solve a significant number of issues with some core concepts.

Tim McElligott looks at a recent Yankee Group report about streamlining the order management process.  While I am not quite ready to anoint, streamlined/automated order management as the key to all of telecom service providers revenue and cost woes…. I am willing say that I agree with Yankee that being able to automate the various relationships with content and 3^rd party providers is a key to making inroads to lowering costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

For revenue assurance organizations, these streamlined/automated order management processes will require additional controls that OM vendors and implementation teams may not be exactly about… However, these automated solutions have risks associated with not only being able to “screw up” a couple of orders…. but all orders until an issue is discovered and a fix is applied….

Everyone LOVES customer are self-service…. That is for most customers. Telecom service providers see the ability to lower costs “dealing with” customers and IT departments see the advantages of new IT aspects of the “self-service” relationship ( ie cool new toys… that vendors love to sell as well… ).  However, often times customers aren’t as enthused about the self-service developments.

I found a good article from Francoise Tourniaire about rules for Customer Care Self Service.  Included in Tourniaire’s principles are the following:

1. Make Self-Service Work for the Customer
2. Develop Seamless Escalation to an Agent
3. Promote Self-Service Offerings
4. Measure Self-Service Metrics

I particularly liked the concept that is first and takes up a significant portion of the article… “Make Self-Service Work for the Customer”.  This is the most important aspect of any self-service implementation.  The provider, IT and the vendor can love the implementation, but if customers start churning due to the implementation… Soon a very “technical” and small customer base will result.

I also would like to point out that “customer care” is not the only aspect…. Customer complaint or venting is also important.  You can learn just as much from a customer compliant encounter as you can from a customer care encounter.  Many “self-service” and “carrier-service” customer care implementations leave that aspect off their “requirements” lists.

Twitter is a good example of how customer can “complain” in real-time while being frustrated with customer care.  Forward thinking organizations are “watching” those avenues and intervening with whatever customer care avenue seems appropriate to the customer.  Again, focusing on customer care work for the customer.

NOTE – I have personally experienced this with Qwest and I have heard good reports about Comcast… again via Twitter :)

Where is your telecom organization when relates to self-service customer care? And new brands of customer complaint?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.

“Fans” of my blog have read the following before:

“When Google does it, it is cool.  When the NSA does it, it is creepy…”

I usually use to to frame an argument that looks at how many people give private organizations lots of power to look at their personal data and complain when government organizations do similar things…

I believe that telematics offers a great opportunity for both telecom service providers and car owners to provide a level of service and information that we/I can even imagine right now. Therese Cory does a great job of looking at some of new telematics developments in Europe.

However, I have to ask if the information that telematics will base its value on will outweigh the risk to personal information?

Cory’s article talks a lot about saving energy with telematics to reduce carbon footprint as well as increase safety of the roadways.  However, can this information be abused?

Will the governments who hope to increase safety issue “virtual tickets” to drivers who speed?

Will vendors or telecom providers mis-use the data associated with telematics and violate privacy laws?

These are all key questions that I think should be answered sooner as opposed to late.

NOTE – Jeff Jonas is one of the smartest people that I have ever seen speak. His blog is one of the great places for discussion of information management and privacy topics… Get it out when you get a chance.

Accenture recently released a study about the issues that major organizations see in terms of risk management.  The results included current problems with their risk-management functions:

• 85% Ineffective integration of risk, return and capital issues in decision-making
• 85% Lack of alignment between the company’s strategies and its risk appetite
• 82% Insufficient enterprise-wide risk culture
• 80% Inadequate availability of timely risk, finance and business data
• 78% Lack of integration and aggregation across all risk types
• 78% Ambiguous risk responsibilities between corporate and business units

And biggest challenges foreseen over the next two years:

• 93% difficulty aligning with the overall business strategy
• 89% the need for more effective collaboration with business units
• 89% the need for greater integration in the firm’s processes and culture
• 89% inadequate resources and talent

Telecommunication service providers, and revenue assurance organizations, as a whole can take some of this information to heart as an indication that greater corporate cultures are seeing some of the same issues that impact revenue assurance everyday.

In particular, I am heartened to see that “lack of integration across risk types” and “inadequate resources and talent” are being recognized at the corporate leadership level.  Now the question is…

Will this set of “action items” make it into the corporate action plan and receive the resources that they deserve?

What do you think? Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.

As the economic situation continues to evolve, organizations are looking at what is important in terms of telecom spending in particular for consumers.  A recent Strategy Analytics survey found that for home-based IP connectivity (ie DSL, cable modem, etc) over 2/3 of respondents were NOT going to make a change:

However, as you can see, that same survey found that mobile connectivity had almost an inverse relationship…

While I would have liked to see an age-based breakdown, I don’t have any issues with the findings… People who may be out of work and need to strength knowledge bases or professional/personal networks are going to do that at home…. You can twitter just as easily at home as you can via phone, but it is still hard to work the resume on an iPhone or other smartphone device…

What do you think of these findings?

Post your comments below or email (John.Myers@BlueBuffaloGroup.com) / twitter (JohnLMyers44) me directly.