Heres a bold statement: with every interaction between an organization and a customer, the bond between them either strengthens or weakens. While most organizations spend a lot on advertising and making promises, how many ensure these promises are delivered? If a promise made is not kept, it negatively impacts a customer’s desire to return, spend or recommend, weakening the bond. Thats why more telcos are investing in Customer Experience Management (CEM) systems to measure and enhance each touch point to deliver what is most important to the customers.

Gartner sums up CEM thusly: The practice of designing and reacting to customer interactions to meet or exceed customer expectations and, thus, increase customer satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy. Or in other words, strengthen the bonds.

Yet many companies have little or no visibility to how well those bonds are doing. Otherwise, why would the following sources of frustration be identified by surveys?

• 91 percent respondents are frustrated that they have to contact an organization multiple times for the same reason;
• 90 percent by being put on hold for a long time
• 89 percent by having to repeat their issue to multiple representatives;
• 84 percent by companies promises one thing, but delivers another

The problems are compounded by the fact that customer service centers are ill equipped to address customer dissatisfaction. While many telecom operators believe they are delivering adequate customer experience, their customers are still in pain because of the narrow focus on maximizing satisfaction at individual moments. And this problem impacts the bottom line: defections due to poor customer experiences result in an estimated $83 billion loss of revenue by US organizations each year.

Whats needed is a total customer journey view, in which telcos can see the totality of the customer experience, not just a moment in time. This view has much more predictability in terms of whether a customer is satisfied or not. It is critical for telcos to appreciate the uniqueness of each customers journey in order to render differential treatments that are immediate, intimate and contextual to that customers persona for a connected digital customer experience.

To get there, a telco has to move to a cross-functional approach, where they get real time view of a customer over their journey. By so doing, they can expect:

1. Increased revenue by identifying customers who are at risk and pull them back in time.

2. A deeper understanding of customers to more effectively engage them, increase retention and       loyalty.

3. Reduced cost of new customer acquisitions.

4. Accelerated issue resolution.

5. Increased cross-sell rates with sophisticated customer segmentation.

By improving the entire end-to-end customer journey, telcos will build stronger bonds with customers, maximizing both customer satisfaction and revenue growth.