Customer Lifecycle Management – Transforming the Telecom Industry in India
The growth of the telecom industry the world over has changed the way we communicate each other. Our personal as well as business lives have been elevated to new levels, thanks to the ability to stay mobile, and the force behind this revolution is the telecom sector.
Now, within the telecom sector too, there are several changes at work. Among the most important ones is the attention this key industry is now paying to the benefits of Customer Lifecycle Management or CLM. The days of traditional marketing and old-style customer management are long gone. The customer’s needs come first today and this is an aspect well taken care of by CLM.
Extremely high levels of competition and unsparing margins have ensured that more companies pay attention to the benefits of CLM in the telecom industry. By collaborating with CLM service providers and enhancing their own customer relationship framework, the telecom sector is garnering profits too.
The concept is not entirely new either. The Alltel Wireless story of 2006 is a prime example of how CLM in the telecom industry has helped companies reap profits. A simple product, ‘My Circle’, introduced with the help of a process set up by its CLM partner Acxiom, helped the company create a continuing business value of a whopping $30 million!
Significance of CLM in Today’s Indian Telecom Industry
In India, the importance of upholding customer relationships is at an all-time high in the telecom sector. The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has been instrumental in changing the way the telecom sector works. Several TRAI policy changes and ground level measures have now handed over crucial decision-making capabilities to the customer.
The ability of a customer to let go of an existing service provider and opt for another one, without having to change the mobile number, is a perfect example of why the telecom industry needs to be paying more attention to the customer retention benefits offered by CLM. One mistake and your customer will quite easily move on to your competitor! This risk gains even more gravity when the client lost is a corporate customer.
The Indian telecom industry is at the threshold of change where it is witnessing a return of pricing power and consolidation. The financial year of 2014 saw the sector’s revenue grow 10.1% compared to 8.6% in 2013, and CLM in the telecom industry will only help in reinforcing these gains.
The workings of CLM in the Telecom Industry in India
As a service oriented industry, a telecom company’s fundamental framework always has the customer’s interests at the core. The relationship may be business-to-customer (B2C) or business-to-business (B2B). In both cases, the customer experience is complete only when the product, service, the entire buying experience as well as the after-service is optimum.
The interactions with the customer, whether it is an enquiry for a new connection from a potential customer or a complaint regarding billing from an existing one, are extremely important and this is where an efficient CLM system gets to work.
Attributed to Colin Shaw, here is a well-rounded definition of customer experience – “an interaction between an organization and a customer, a blend of the organization’s physical performance, with senses stimulated and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact.”
When this seems like a tall order even on paper, one can only imagine the amount of hard work required on the ground! The induction of CLM in the Indian telecom industry has helped companies build better relationships with their customers by offering them enhanced experiences, at the same time taking into account several defining factors.
- Refining brand experience
- Uniformity across all channels
- Customer retention management
- Augmenting the extent and value of the customer cycle
- Improved customer communication
- Superior customer care framework
- Creating new opportunities
- Dedicated loyalty programs
- Outthinking the competition
Apart from these, understanding customer requirements from an enhanced perspective is an invaluable spinoff of CLM in the telecom industry in India. This sets the pace for a business to interact more closely with the customer, thus enabling it to make relevant changes, faster that the competition. With the right CLM service provider for telecom provider, that has abundant experience in the telecom industry and the right business tools for the job, your business could begin reaping the rewards of CLM too.
Conneqt Business Solutions offers comprehensive Customer Lifecycle Management services across various business sectors, including those from the telecom industry. In 2013, the Indian telecom industry was the second-largest telecommunications market in the world, and as a growing and promising market, certainly requires the important component of CLM to play a strong role in this growth.