The uninterrupted customer journey doesn’t have to be just a pipedream for marketers. In this blog post, I will look at how business support systems can make the experience seamless
Picture this. Your customer sits down with his iPad, and spends ten minutes browsing through your different bundles, before settling on the perfect quad-play (broadband Internet access, television and telephone with wireless service provisions) offering. He chooses data speeds, hardware, and accessories, and clicks Order. Two days later, to his surprise, instead of the service call he was waiting for, he receives a phone call informing him that his neighborhood doesn’t have the infrastructure to support the quad-play offer he wanted. Politely, he is asked to go back to the site and place his order again.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because of how commonplace the scenario is. While service providers have all the information they need to make online shopping a smooth experience, they can’t always make it happen. In most cases, it is because their online shopping systems are not integrated with their business support systems (BSS), and so the online shopping system displays offers that the customer can’t receive. This leads to aggravated customers who not only don’t get the products and services that they ordered, but are also one step closer to looking at alternative providers.
Meeting customers’ expectations from the digital world
Clearly, today's customers are not satisfied with such order fallout scenarios. But they also have other expectations. They expect a richness of choice, as well as a simple and consistent shopping experience across channels, whether it is a digital channel, the call center or the retail store. These are the critical starting points for service providers to engage with their customers. And if they want them to shop there and remain loyal, they must deliver a compelling experience.
Integration with your BSS systems is important not just for ensuring that when a customer visits your site, the system knows which offers and products can be offered to that specific customer, and can provider a personalised price. It’s also important for ensuring that your site can offer and then charge for bundles across your multi-play offerings, in addition to selling digital and hard goods.
The latest advancements in digital commerce capabilities also enable consistent shopping experiences across your different commerce channels. So for example, if customers want to switch from laptop to tablet mid-order, the system can keep track of where they are, so they don’t have to re-navigate their order.
The ability to deliver multi-play offerings, together with a personalised and omni-channel experience for your customers will shift you from the position of “a service provider with a web site” to a real digital business.
By Chris Williams, head of global marketing at Amdocs.
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