Customer Service and the potential in the customer relationship is the biggest asset Telecoms possess. Whether they effectively leverage this asset or not is still to be seen.
When my local service provider calls my home and offers a service I already subscribe to from them it reminds me of that wasted opportunity and the magnitude of the challenge before these Telcos.
They already know what I subscribe to. They know my movements and my consumption patterns. They know that I pick up a coffee every morning and that on most morning I drive to work (and other times I just come back home). They know this… of course they can’t do anything with it since I haven’t allowed them to – but they haven’t even asked!
If they truly leverage what they ‘know’ about me, even simple CRM-type data, my experience with my local provider would be exponentially improved and I probably wouldn’t play that silly game that Canadians play every 3 years. The switching Telcos game. Predictable and a pain.
Real-time, personalized offers would be possible. My loyalty and stickiness as a customer would increase. Concerns about the Cost of Acquisition (COA) and retention management (churn) would be less and less… as a Telco’s attention would shift to providing value-added services that would automatically help with the churn anyways. I would much rather go with one vendor (and that could very well be my Telco) rather than a dozen different ones. It would simplify my life if Telcos understood me and provided other services that I currently receive elsewhere.
