Evolving the Customer Experience

摘要

The breakthrough technological innovations in the field of digital electronics have totally transformed the way the world looks at communications today. With higher band-widths becoming cheaper, the distances are converging and the entire mass seems to be moving into a consolidation phase. The end users of this technology stand to gain the most, with many players competing in this fierce race for their share of the pie. With every such wave of technological innovation, the customers are increasingly enriching their experience and the industry in turn is defining a new baseline or de facto standard for itself.rnHowever, with stiffer competition and increasing customer expectations, service providers (SPs) are finding it more difficult to keep pace with the changing ecosystem. As a result of this, SPs face the challenges of higher churns and lower average revenue per user (ARPU). The commoditization of telephonic services has inspired many players to join this emerging field, and as a result, incumbent and long-established players are now finding it difficult to bring out a differentiation for making customers stick to their network. This is the picture that is coming out at a macro level. This paper tries to explore in more detail some of the challenges that loom in the communications industry as it readies itself to embrace convergence.rnTraditionally, voice was identified with DMS or class 5 switches, and packetized Internet data used to be identified with routers. Convergence was a phenomenon used to associate or bundle the two together to be offered to end users. In a competitive market that was witnessing saturation in the traditional plain old telephone service (POTS), convergence became the buzz word. In a frenzy to gain competitive advantage, some SPs started the electronic stapling of services to give their own meaning to the word convergence. However, in actual terms it was a mere consolidation of charges across services that SPs were offering to their customers, with no interlinking whatsoever among the services.