WHITEPAPER FEbRuARy 2016

www.hcltech.com

The ‘New Customer Experience’ at HCL for CSPs

AuthOr:

Vikram Parihar ‘Regional Sales Director’ with HCL, specializes in Telecom domain

With a strong business acumen, a specialist in Strategic Account Management, Business Development & Lifecycle Management for Telecom & Media Domain; possesses clear understanding of the current and future needs of this industry and is a thought leader in driving towards meeting customer requisites through consulting and partnerships.’

2THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

In recent years, there has been a groundswell of interest in

improving the Customer Experience (CX) to differentiate in a

world of increasing parity of products and pricing. Based on

media reports, much of the attention has been on companies

dealing directly with consumers. Customer care, customer

experience, and customer engagement are just a few of the

terms being thrown around as the industry collectively searches

for ways to unravel the mysteries of what makes customers tick

and how to please them, with good reason. Communication

Service providers, historically rank near the bottom of surveys

examining customer service.

• CSPs struggle to deliver an excellent customer experience

resulting in high rates of customer churn.

• Compared to customer experience leaders such as Apple,

Google, and Amazon that enjoy a Net

• Promoter Score (NPS) being in the 70-80 range, CSPs

report an NPS as low as 3.

Senior marketers from around the globe are acting fast—with or

without their IT partners—in the face of transformations towards

customer experience sweeping through industries. But wait,

has the customer not always been king—or, at least, ‘right’?

In truth, customers’ voices have been somewhat muffled in the

past—filtered through layers of focus groups, departmental

agendas, time, and space—compared to what is possible

today. “IT becomes pivotal to achieving leadership in customer

experience,” agrees Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick, Vice President

and Principal Analyst Serving CIOs. “Without IT, customer

experience professionals resort to tinkering at the edges. Our

research suggests CIOs and IT leaders are critical players in

winning the customer experience game. But to win, IT cannot

simply pay lip service to customer experience. IT leaders must

consider it a very real business discipline and see it as one of

the most important roles of the technology team,” Fenwick

continues.

ABSTRACT

3THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

Treating customer experience as a strategic imperative can be

the difference between lasting success and losing customers to

competition. Cable Multiple System Operators (MSOs) do not

have to compromise to raise customer experience to its highest

standard. They do need to make services easier to purchase,

own, and use. CIOs are challenged to enable front- and back-

office systems that can do the job of meeting customers where

they are and where they want to go. At the same time, they

need to be thinking about a third kind of office system—the

‘out-of-office’. These out-of-office systems often include social

networks or mobile applications. They may require API-based

development to connect with your internal systems so that

the data generated from them can be captured and analyzed.

They come and grow according to customer preference, and

sometimes require platforms that can grow or go, accordingly.

“Going beyond the transaction is a significant challenge for

customer and product centers of the business, but it calls

for a quantum leap by enterprise IT to a new horizon, out of

office,” according to PwC. “Out-of-office systems power post-

transaction services and put the customer consumption value

proposition front and center. Out-of-office systems serve the

customers by augmenting their experiences and helping them

achieve personal goals.”

All of this requires a level of flexibility that IT departments may

or may not have in-house. A priority for the CIO, therefore, is

to determine what is possible, by using the existing systems,

and what needs to be built to support future initiatives across

mobile, social, cloud, and big data.

WHY ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’?

4THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

Every time customers interact with their service providers, they

have an experience. Downloading a digital application, ordering

or updating a service, paying a bill, visiting a store, calling

customer care, managing their accounts online, or simply

making a call or watching TV are all customer experiences.

There are a number of Business- and Operational Support

Systems (BSS/ OSS) and related business processes that

power these activities such as billing, CRM, ordering, self-

service, service fulfillment, digital content delivery, network

capacity management and more, because each shapes the

customer experience. The simple fact is that you can have all

the systems, processes, and data analytics you want, but it will

not move the needle until there is a change in the mindset. It is

clear that the CSPs still do not get it. That does not mean the

CSPs do not realize they have a problem. They are aware of

the same and are spending a lot of money attempting to right

the wrongs.

Key Challenges

Managing the customer experience means that CSPs must employ smarter communications and problem resolution techniques for all types of customer interactions. At the same time, they also need to maintain or improve operational effectiveness. The key challenges they face are:

Inconsistency across customer journey - Consolidating information from multiple channels to develop a deep understanding of customer needs, interests, habits, and preferences

Providing intelligent support tools to produce a positive customer experience

Shifting more operations to self-service mode, and reserving call center involvement for the most complex cases where expert CSR (Customer Service Record) advice is really needed

Focus on customer education through intelligent assistance to reduce OpEx

Maintaining or improving operational effectiveness

5THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

Three critical actions have been identified for communications providers to meet the challenges of the marketplace and capitalize on the available opportunities:

HOW TO ADDRESS THEM?

Leverage unique assets to offer value to customers. Make it personal.

Implement technology to increase revenue through the delivery of new services quickly. Utilize intuitive and functional products to provide enhanced customer experience.

1 2Deploy smart analytics to differentiate the customer experience and improve customer satisfaction. Enable human-centered analytics.

3

6THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

Two other priorities of CIOs today are Data Center Consolidation and the Adoption of Virtualization and Cloud Computing Technologies. These priorities are tightly linked and driven by similar business needs – new customer experience, cost reduction, business agility, and operational efficiency. IT organizations wishing to address these priorities as part of the implementation of an IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) strategy will usually start by consolidating the servers and storage layers through virtualization. However, recent technologies have emerged to allow IT organizations to implement the same consolidation and virtualization concepts in additional layers within the data center. These also let organizations achieve even higher cost reduction and greater business agility.

At HCL, our offerings focus on the following aspects of customer experience:

¼ Consulting for current benchmarks of performance - What is good and bad performance both in terms of operating performance (number of voluntary disconnects, number of repeat trouble calls, and number of phone calls) and CEM (Customer Effort, Customer Satisfaction, and Net Promoter Score)

¼ Develop correlation between CEM metrics (Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction, Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Effort, and Churn) and repair and service performance metrics (first call resolution, repeat trouble calls, outage percentage, and others)

¼ Develop early warning metrics - Use network and CPE telemetry information that signals emerging problems so that operators can do a better job of solving problems before the customer faces the issue

The age-old debate about the future of CSPs being dumb pipes or value-added DSPs-Digital Signal Processing- is not about networks, services or technology. The debate is about respecting the people who spend their hard-earned money on carriers. The same principles that have separated successful businesses from those on the dust heap apply here as well, and CSPs will do well to rethink their view of the customer, and all aspects that HCL’s services can be leveraged!

HCL’S APPROACH

ON CEM

7THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

HCL’s approach to driving Customer Engagement Experience Transformation works on three dimensions:

¼ Transforming the way you interact with customers

¼ Transforming the way you build products

¼ Transforming the way your operate

We can drive a steep change in an operator’s ability to influence and shape customer experience across all their customer touch points through 9 transformation initiatives:

We have driven several large Digital Transformation Programs aimed at transforming the customer engagement experience of global telecom operators. Our ‘Commerce-to-Go’ solution, for

example, is part of a wider set of Cloud Service Wraps that we have invested in to accelerate the time to digitalize customer management functions. We can operationalize a Carrier-grade Commerce-on-Cloud solution for a fixed monthly fee which includes infrastructure, software, implementation, and support. This solution implements industry-leading technologies and delivers functionalities typical of large eCommerce development initiatives.

We have progressively built a number of Transformation Accelerators with over 50 solution accelerators and extensions on the Oracle Commerce Core platform. We have additional accelerators for other platforms, which are supported by industry-leading technology partnerships.

HOW CAN HCL HELP?

8THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

HCL can help operators in a number of ways:

¼ Advisory and Consulting (Omni-Channel, eCommerce, and Customer Engagement Experience Strategy)

¼ Product and Architecture Assessment and Derivation

¼ Customer Journey Derivation

¼ Implementation and Migration (Omni-Channel and eCommerce)

¼ Support and Maintenance

9THE ‘NEW CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE’ AT HCL FOR CSPS

The market is changing rapidly and CSPs need to respond to succeed against a

new generation of competition from outside the traditional telecom industry. With

customers’ expectations changing, CSPs must reinvent themselves. The dismal

quality of customer experience, that has been a defining aspect of CSPs globally, has

to improve exponentially. CSPs are at the cross-roads of becoming a utility provider

providing bandwidth as a commodity, or transforming themselves into vibrant providers

of the digital lifestyle.

CIO’s must realize that the transformation required is a business need that will not be

achieved by IT Transformation alone.

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ABOUT HCL

About HCL Technologies

HCL Technologies is a leading global IT services company working with clients in the areas that

impact and redefine the core of their businesses. Since its emergence on the global landscape,

and after its IPO in 1999, HCL has focused on ‘transformational outsourcing’, underlined by

innovation and value creation, offering an integrated portfolio of services including software-led

IT solutions, remote infrastructure management, engineering and R&D services and business

services. HCL leverages its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in

31 countries to provide holistic, multi-service delivery in key industry verticals including Financial

Services, Manufacturing, Consumer Services, Public Services and Healthcare & Life sciences.

HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ which empowers

its 105,571 transformers to create real value for customers. HCL Technologies, along with its

subsidiaries, had consolidated revenues of US$ 6 billion, for the Financial Year ended as on

30th September 2015 (on LTM basis). For more information, please visit www.hcltech.com

About HCL Enterprise

HCL is a $7 billion leading global technology and IT enterprise comprising two companies

listed in India – HCL Technologies and HCL Infosystems. Founded in 1976, HCL is one

of India’s original IT garage start-ups. A pioneer of modern computing, HCL is a global

transformational enterprise today. Its range of offerings includes product engineering, custom

& package applications, BPO, IT infrastructure services, IT hardware, systems integration,

and distribution of information and communications technology (ICT) products across a wide

range of focused industry verticals. The HCL team consists of over 110,000 professionals of

diverse nationalities, who operate from 31 countries including over 505 points of presence in

India. HCL has partnerships with several leading global 1000 firms, including leading IT and

technology firms. For more information, please visit www.hcl.com