Milintec CRM spoke with this about the service challenges facing large enterprises and the company’s differentiation between personalization and a customer-centric approach.
Dwayne Ruffin, senior vice president of product Management at CSG Systems, has a lot on his plate. Charged with overseeing the evolution of the company from a provider of fairly standard customer management tools for the telecommunications, cable and satellite industries, he not only must help his customers deal with new communication channels; he’s also got to help them understand that customer expectations are on the rise and standing still is not an option. His customer companies are struggling to find new revenue while introducing new services; to maintain and improve customer service means introducing new strategies and technologies. That was what motivated the company’s acquisition of Quaero in 2008.
Ruffin spoke to Milintec CRM about the service challenges facing large enterprises, the difficulty of meeting customer expectations and the company’s differentiation between personalization and a customer-centric approach.
Milintec CRM: Your traditional customers have been in the cable, satellite and telecommunications businesses. Those industries often get pretty tough grades from consumers. Are the players in those areas starting to understand what a competitive advantage painless service could be?
Ruffin: I think they’ve gotten it for a long period time. The challenges rest in the inability to normalize behavior across disparate systems. When you look at cable operators and, definitely, in the telco space, through acquisition they acquire a lot of systems, and a lot of work is required to rationalize those systems. If you’re not effective at it, you’ve got customer data that resides in many different places. Trying to bring that together and make it meaningful from a customer experience or a rep experience has been a challenge. If you look at cable, and look the J.D. Powers surveys, those who have a tendency to score high have some consistency in the systems that sit beneath that desktop presentation. They’ve got one billing system, they’ve normalized how they provision customers, there’s an enterprise data warehouse, and there’s one place to go as the source of information for customers. I really do think that their challenge has been bringing the infrastructure together from an IT perspective to serve the business, and those who have done well have scored high.
Milintec CRM: How will social media begin to impact what you do and what you provide your customers, as well as how your customers envision their relationships with their clientele?
Ruffin: I think social media’s impact is really centered around personalization and convenience. I think our customers understand that the consumer ultimately will determine consumption of services, moving away from putting together a bundle and pitching that bundle and hoping that it sticks. I think they’re seeing clear indications in other markets, and I won’t use the Apple disintermediation of content as an example because it’s overused, but they understand that they need to be supportive of the ways that consumers will ultimately leverage entertainment and communication. A lot of the constructs that you see in social media – the collaboration components, the recommendation components – we haven’t seen advertising to date, but I think that’s soon to come. The valuations of these companies that play in the social space are indicative of the expectation that you’ll be able to leverage them from a commerce perspective. They’re taking all of those things into account. When you hear about interactive television, or when you hear about the ability to collaborate with tools like polling and chat on the television, as well as on the Internet and mobile sides, they clearly understand the desire of the end consumer, to be much more collaborative and much more selective in how they consume content, moving away from subscriptions to more of a one-off selection. They’re evolving to support that.
The pace has been slow, to be completely candid. What we need to do in order to support those environments is to make sure that our customers have visibility into all the things consumers are doing with their services. No longer do you just need to understand those things that transpire at the billing engine. You need to be aware of things that are happening outside of billing. They’re happening on Web pages, they’re happening in the network in terms of how consumers are actually leveraging those services.
Milintec CRM: It seems like often customers have more access to company information than call center agents. What has the impact of the widespread availability of information on the Internet meant for you?
Ruffin: Our opinion is that our customers need to make sure they apply tools in a systematic fashion so that all the intelligence associated with promoting the right products to consumers doesn’t reside between the ears of an agent. There’s lots of turnover in call centers. What you really need are tools that can prompt the agent and give them the flexibility to respond to the customers’ intent. The tools should know first and foremost everything there needs to be known about competitive offers in an area. You know that that consumer, especially if he’s yours, if he’s gone to a competitor’s Web page, you make the assumption that he’s been shopping, you apply some analytics to determine what might be a better fit in terms of his services. That would incorporate all the things I talked about in the previous question like understanding not only the billing relationship or what services a customer currently subscribes to but what he is actually doing with those services so you can right-size them. Many of our customers are moving in that direction — make sure that they have a systematic approach to that. We’ve made a heavy investment in leveraging our channels. CSG is more than a revenue-management or billing company. We’ve deployed lots of applications that help our customers interact with their end consumers. What we were lacking prior to a recent acquisition was the ability to make those interactions smart and intuitive and operationalize those interactions so they were systematic. That’s really why we acquired Quaero — to bring those pieces together. Our customers, to varying degrees, have leveraged tools, but I’ve yet to see many of them operationalize those things and make them systematic. We think that’s a potential opportunity for us.
Milintec CRM: Large organizations are not that inclined to switch vendors for service support software unless they really have to. What have you seen as the motivating factors that have led customers away from other products and to CSG?
Ruffin: We haven’t seen any customers defect and move toward enterprise CRM or a Siebel-like application. My belief is that’s because those applications often lack domain knowledge of a specific vertical. That’s where we’ve had a lot of success. What we know about, the business of our customers, is reflected within our applications. You’re not talking about a commercially available application that has to be retooled to support the business. What we do first and foremost is make sure that we have the knowledge of the industry baked into that application. Additionally, I think what customers are really looking for is — they want a lot of flexibility, but at the end of the day you have a lot of pieces in your infrastructure, and if they’re not synced up then you’re not getting the business benefit that you need. We pride ourselves in being able to evolve our applications, but within synchronization with other applications. When we release code and it’s specific to a business problem; we’ve already made sure that doesn’t break anything else downstream.
Milintec CRM: Can you describe the shift the company is making from personalization toward a more customer-centric approach, and explain how those two terms have different meanings?
Ruffin: What we did with our revenue management environment was to deploy a system that has the customer record at the heart of it. It allows you to manage the business processes that couldn’t otherwise be managed. I use an example where provider X is your service provider in Buffalo, New York. If you move to L.A. within that same provider footprint, the provider should have knowledge of that. We made the application very customer centric in that all services, locations, past experiences and so on are tied to that record. As that record moves from one location to the next, everything comes with it. It makes it very easy for our customers - and let’s face it, they’re becoming few, they’ve been going through consolidation and will probably continue to consolidate, so the probability of you moving from one geography to another but remaining within the same provider footprint is very strong. So when we say customer centric, it’s really been with that piece in mind so all the actions that you enable are aware of that customer and what that customer represents to the enterprise.
Personalization keys more off the preferences of that customer. So personalization means you’re taking very specific actions based ion either what you would derive the intent of that customer to be or what that customer has told you their preferences are. That can span the gamut from want to be advised of marketing activities, I want to be advised where the tech is on the day of install, I want to indicate to the provider that my preferred method of communication before the tech arrives is to call me 30 minutes prior to install, call me at my office because my office is only five miles from home and I don’t want to spend all day sitting on the couch waiting for you. If you don’t reach me there, I want you to send me an SMS, and if the SMS doesn’t work, I want you to go ahead and send me an email. All the while, I also want to be able to go to the web and understand where that tech is up to the minute. So when we talk about personalization – I gave you an example that’s very operationally focused. We also have examples that are marketing focused in terms of you wanting to be aware of new service introductions, ways to extend the product, etc. We’re really talking about driving our behavior based on what the customer prefers vs. drawing some assumptions around what is best for the customer.
It amazes me to this day how much money is spent trying to draw inferences from customer activity instead of actually letting the customer tell you what’s important to them and using that information to manage the experience.
Milintec CRM: How critical is knowledge management to this notion of service based on the immediate needs of the customer?
Ruffin: You’ve probably heard a lot of conversation around things like authentication and entitlement. They’re really wrestling with the idea that, I have a captive audience, so to speak, I’ve got a customer who has a monthly relationship with me via a subscription. I can continue to add value to that customer by making sure that they can use that subscription to move their content or their entertainment to many devices – it might be their PC, and it might be a mobile device. The classic example I always use is, I have a relationship with my cable provider. As part of that I have a subscription to a sports tier that entitles me to watch Nuggets games from my couch. Why can’t I do that when I’m traveling and in a hotel room and there’s nothing on TV and I prefer to watch a Nuggets game? They’re struggling with how to monetize those things and clearly they have some carriage issues to negotiate with the content providers.
Milintec CRM: You mentioned the replacement of personalization - which was based on up-selling and cross-selling. But clearly, those functions aren't going away. Where does sales go in your vision of the service transaction?
Ruffin: Personalization includes up-selling and cross-selling based on unique insights or instructions from the customer. In an ideal world, the operator would have gathered or inferred the customers preferences via direct and indirect channels. Sales is the key component of service – sales can have many dimensions; new sales, up-selling and right-sizing the offer based on the customers’ consumption patterns. At the end of the day, our customers are telling us that it is increasingly difficult to maintain a customer if you don’t respond to their interaction and consumptions patterns.
Milintec CRM: Have your customers been able to quantify the cost savings of well-managed services? And, for those who have, is this something that leads them to you, or is it something they discover after becoming a customer?
Ruffin: All of our products are built on the value proposition that they will provide business benefit to the customer. Most products are gearing toward bottom line improvements. Our customers understand the value of allowing a world-class operator to manage its services in a self-regulated environment. Our business was built on reliability and repeatability – Our customers seek out and stay with CSG because of these two factors.
Milintec CRM: Since service is gaining in its importance as an aspect of CRM, does CSG have plans to reach beyond its current focus into other verticals?
Ruffin: Yes, much of our focus is geared toward applying our solutions in unique ways in other verticals and geographies.
Milintec CRM: What is the one service challenge that you'd most like to see overcome in the next year?
Ruffin: Without having to purchase or rent another set top or recording device, I’d like to see the Web brought to my living room viewing experience. Search and recommendations are staples of the Internet experience – it shouldn’t be an enormous leap to bring that to a screen larger than 17 inches. For now, I would be satisfied with an Internet guide that allows me to search, preview, and catalog content on my TV.
