I spent a day yesterday at Management World. It wasn’t long enough and I’m regretting the decision I made to stay only a day, although my liver isn’t. Still, I had a good go at diving into the keynotes and then a bevvy of briefings. I was taking the rough theme of Customer Experience Management as my starting point – looking at how this buzzword can be broken down and made sense of. This meant talking to companies who are coming at this area from different directions. The first three of those meetings are summarised below.
As for Management World – quick impressions were that it was an excellently run event from the front of house point of view – catering taken care of, beautiful venue, free WiFi going full gun most of the day. There was active involvement from the TM Forum crowd in terms of communication and content, and a clear determination to make the new venue work. Numbers were up 20% on last year as well, taking attendance to 3,500. I heard a few gripes on the exhibition floor but these were mainly to do with teething issues such as screens not working, and I don’t think Oracle was too happy to be not only behind a rather large pillar (which they presumably already knew about) but also behind a screen advertising the Dublin Convention Centre in front of same pillar.
The keynotes (all I saw of the actual conference sessions, I’m afraid – hence my regret at not staying longer) were variable – there seemed to be rather too much “Hello Ireland” at first, but the speakers got over that and most of them managed to deliver a point or two. Starhub CEO Neil Montefiore reprised his role as “operator who gets CEM” from our CEM round table in the last issue, and broke a few hearts by describing the Singaporean set-up. Singapore is hardly a market that most operators can relate to (fibre everywhere, no backhaul issues, only 600 square kilometres, active government support for FTTH (every H, by the way)). Even so, Montefiore gave a few pointers as to where he thinks the rest of the market can make some money – a vision that built on gaining a deeper knowledge of customer activity to provide more intelligent QoS-based services. A nice primer for the rest of my day, at least.
I carried out a clutch of briefings, and instead of rolling them all into some considered essay, I thought I’d deliver the essence of them here, and let you join the dots. This is a) easier for me, of course, but b) hopefully easier for the reader too – quick take aways as to the companies involved and where they are coming from.
So here we are – the first three of my Management World mini-briefings – more to follow tomorrow:
Was detailing “Convergys CRM powered by Microsoft Dynamics CRM 2011” – the results of its tie-up with Microsoft, announced a year ago, which builds an ordering and service management platform on top of Microsoft Dynamics’ platform. This is a telco-specific product that extends the generic enterprise capabilities of Microsoft’s Dynamics product.
The idea is to provide a single view of all the different systems that operators have deployed on a per-service basis, so that a customer agent or contact centre can get a unified view of the customer. The company is pushing the view that as 4G/LTE expands the level of services operators will be offering, and the complexity of the service management and customer experience management involved, operators will need automated solutions that deliver accurate information to customers and to care agents and business units.
Top Quote:
“If operators can’t treat their customers in a consistent way and offer meaningful pricing, packages and ordering processes then they are going to lose those customers.”
Tony Jackson, Director, Telecoms Solution Strategy
SUBEX:
Was pushing the real time and “live” data handling capabilities of its ROC platform beyond its well-known role in fraud management and revenue assurance, and into the wider area of customer experience management. Is also flying the flag for managed services. The company is aware that it’s in pretty crowded company in both those areas, but says that it’s genuine about what it can and can’t do – and explains its role in validating and evaluating real time data makes it ideally placed to play a part in the service development strategies of telco operators. Again, ROC allows operators to get a single view of their customer, but by following the “money trail” rather than building from the ground up from network data, for instance.
Top Quote:
“Our focus is on creating and presenting actionable intelligence that operators can take action on quickly. The data warehouse is an elephant, and you can’t make an elephant dance.” COO Sudeesh Yezhuvath.
MDS
Focussing on two niche markets – virtual network operators and on mobile enterprise billing and service management. Major customer BT Mobile is an example of the former, while O2 uses MDS to manage its enterprise business billing, order management and analytics. such, MDS’ platform gives the operator the ability to add bespoke and custom tariffs quickly, respond to individual contacts and get a service operational very quickly. It’s a product that avoids the need for deep integration of an operators’ systems in a major transformation project, while still giving a single customer view. MDS is also seeking to bring its analytics capabilities into customers that have the billing/CRM product. CEO Drew Rockwell said that a $50 million company must offer focus in order to differentiate, and there’s no point pretending to be all things to all people when it clearly isn’t.
Top Quote:
MDS builds its products on a single data model across billing and CRM, rather than bolting on CRM to a billing product through acquisition. This single database model allows us to integrate from the customer down, rather than from the systems up.” Drew Rockwell, CEO.