Marketing, IT need to work together to improve customer experience, CMO survey finds

Communications service providers are fighting internal battles between their financial, IT and marketing departments that prevent them from deploying innovative plans that would help them retain customers and increase consumer satisfaction, according to a new survey from the Chief Marketing Officier Council. While wireless and over-the-top operators scored better than their cable, satellite and ISP counterparts, all can improve how they manage subscriber complexity.
The 64-page report is the result of interviews with 212 senior-level executives in marketing and IT globally, as well as in-depth interviews with prominent marketing and technology executives at some of the best-known global operators, along with market influencers and academia, conducted in April and May. The survey was sponsored by Openet.
Consumers are becoming more complex, enjoying activities across multiple screens as smartphone an d tablet adoption increases, said Liz Miller, VP of marketing programs and operations for the CMO Council. Operators, however, have been unable to keep up with how they manage their subscribers and integrate customer data across offerings so they can offer new services.
“Increasing bandwidth demands is biggest contributor (55%) to subscriber complexity, followed by support requirements for new devices (35%), the survey found. “Operators point to difficulties in provisioning new offerings to customers (81%) and a lack of knowledge of these customers (72%), along with a growing diversity of services (77%) as the key hurdles in delivering targeted services to subscribers. Poor alignment and lack of data integration also came up as impediments to delivering the optimal customer experience,” according to the report.
Operators traditionally have gotten into a “vicious pricing cycle” to battle their competitors, Miller said. While that isn’t new knowledge, the rate at which customers are changing is a new concern. “Executives need to reprioritize what gets fixed first. The customer experience has to move up the chain,” she said. “A key roadblock is the disconnect between marketing, IT and sales.”
Corporate mindsets tend to focus on the network, operations and finance, not about what the consumer wants. Even moreso, nearly half of respondents said they have significant issues with integrating customer data stored in different areas of their networks so they can’t deliver custom services to their customers. This can result in the embarrassing situations when operators offer a lower-price promotion for a new customer to an existing customer, for example, Miller said. As the rate of growth slows, retaining existing customers becomes even more important because there are fewer new customers to gain.
Further, professionals answering the survey said that they think if they did figure out how to manage their customers better, they would see a revenue uptick. Roughly 30% said that revenue uptick would be between 6% and 10%, and another 22% of respondents pegged the revenue increase from 11% to 15%, Miller noted.
While the IT and marketing departments traditionally have been at odds, as marketing becomes data-driven, with metrics on hand to prove what works and what isn’t successful, the two groups need to align their strategies, she said. “IT and marketing have to create, bill, manage and customize” products that are meaningful to customers. Interestingly, nearly 75% of operators said they are considering or thinking about new partnerships or opportunities with over-the-top services. And social media is impacting their networks. “As more and more subscribers get connected using multiple devices and different apps, the scenario gets more complicated for the operator,” the report said. “Not only do media rich formats and devices create the demand for more bandwidth, but they also raise the bar of user expectation in terms of quality of delivery and uptime of key services and apps. It’s interesting to note that some of the factors that shaped the communications landscape a decade ago like music downloads and digital photos ranked relatively low on the list of trends today.”