ADVANCE, CHANGE, DEVELOP AND EVOLVE

September 2002

Not so long ago, telecoms networks were run by technocrats and an entire global industry was driven by the race to implement new technology.

Operators and manufacturers spent a lot of time and money on research and development to come up with whizzy new gizmos. Unfortunately, it was usually only afterwards that anyone bothered to find out if there was a market for what had been invented. And all too often there wasn’t.

Under the late and unlamented old system, the monopoly carriers had a captive audience. There was no choice; subscribers could only like or lump the ‘services’ that were provided (please note, I do not write ‘offered’). And then, to add insult to injury, they also had to pay through the nose for the few that were available.

In those days, the carriers regarded their subscribers with quite remarkable contempt; seeing them, literally, as no more than numbers. That these numbers might actually be individual customers to be cultivated and nurtured was an utterly alien concept.

But how times have changed. The new carriers that sprang up in the fertile ground that was created as successive waves of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation swept around the world began to slug it out for market share with the old incumbent national telcos. And suddenly the customer was king!

Pre-competition, carriers and operators paid little attention to their billing systems and even less to such ‘touchy-feely’ areas as customer relationship management. However, as subscribers began to quit the telcos in droves, drastically falling revenues forced them to focus their minds.

Operators abruptly found that they had to look after their customers or lose them. As mobile telephony proliferated churn rates drove some carriers close to bankruptcy. Something had to be done and, suddenly, billing and CRM systems became vital to commercial success and central to carriers growth strategies. Now, the market is maturing, and operators (and especially mobile operators) are no longer scrambling to win customers through the roll–out of new infrastructure and further extending coverage. In fact, there are very few ‘new to the world’ customers left to be had. These days, to increase their customer base, operators have to persuade subscribers to desert their current carrier and sign-up with them. That’s why the emphasis is now so much on looking after existing customers, satisfying their needs and, by so doing, persuading them to spend more on new services and applications.

Today, technology is a given. Customers neither need to know, nor do they care, about how their phones work. But they do care very much indeed about the applications that they use and the services they receive. Operators can only differentiate themselves in a crowded and competitive market, and can only make profit, via the applications and services they provide and their skills in customer retention and customer relationship management .

And the key to that is billing and CRM systems. They can differentiate an operator much more than a network ever can. After all, a phone call is just a phone call but a valued and valuable customer is a joy forever.
Martyn Warwick

Editorial Director, Decisive Media Group