Call centers may have been a staple of customer care operations for decades, but changes in communications culture will change their role as a primary channel. The following is a list of forces and factors that will impact call centers’ ultimate place in an evolving customer experience. 1- Cost. Maybe no other factor will have as great an impact on contact centers’ future role than cost. They are expensive and that makes them vulnerable in a market where price competition dominates and services keep increasing in complexity. 2- Time. We live in a society where things like Twitter dictate
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Common sense has left the building. Again. Just when telcos are coming to terms with the fact that charging for SMS is becoming a thing of the past, Facebook decides to charge for, er, sending messages. Their latest announcements include plans to charge £10 to guarantee to deliver a message to a celebrity and £1 to deliver a message to someone who is not in your immediate friends’ network. Unless I am now terminally old then the first idea is flawed because I, as a celebrity (I am being hypothetical) would pay £11 not to
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I wanted to buy a cake for my little girl and Apple wouldn’t let me. Its failure left my daughter disappointed, me cursing Apple, and cost Apple’s ecosystem partner – the app developer – an in-app sale. Apple’s monopolistic choke hold over the mobile ecosystem needs to be seen as a brewing anti-trust issue and stopped. Nothing gives me more joy than making my daughter happy. So when she asked me to unlock different color frosting on her dessert-making app, I was pleased to do it for her. The problem was, Apple told me my
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I’ve made the argument twice now that Oracle’s acquisitions of Acme Packet and Tekelec are Big Data plays. I stand by that argument, but I also think these buys are a sign of how intelligence is moving out of the network and into a sort of new layer that pulls together things like diameter signalling and session border control, policy control, software-defined networking, and real-time billing and charging. BillingViews reader Geoff Coleman made the point, in his recent comment, that a variety of large players from the IT side of the business are ”moving the policy (management) away from
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Over the past few months we have written several articles about trust. Our conclusion is that operators should use their ‘trusted’ relationship with their customers to guide them through the digital world. By building trust with their customers – particularly in Europe – customers will share more and more of their data and realize the benefits of doing so. Demand too much information too quickly and the trust dies. The problem is that no-one else cares. You ‘buy’ something from iTunes and unless you agree to the terms and conditions you cannot proceed. Not really
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When I read things like this article from Venture Beat it makes me wonder whether all of us in the OSS/BSS sector are speaking loudly in a crowded room where no one is listening. It also gets me entertainingly irritated. If you just scan the article, you’ll notice an overt plug at the bottom for Venture Beat’s Mobile Summit, running April 1 and 2 in – of course – San Francisco. The group pats itself on the back for ostensibly coining a phrase when it says “…what we’re calling ‘The Mobile Experience.’” Um…what? Sorry guys, I’ve
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Data and voice plans without contracts have been around for years. In fact I can’t remember the last time I was on any mobile plan that involved a contract. These plans are usually very attractive in terms of rates and conditions because they do not include any subsidy of handsets and do not have time clauses. This is the original BYOD concept. They are usually dead simple to understand – you buy your own phone and get a SIM from an operator. You put the SIM in the phone and ‘voila’ off you go. You
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It is nearly that time when awards competitions, resembling middle school essay contests, are drummed up to push publications’ (and other institutions’) brands at a slew of industry events. So, in light of the forthcoming flood of etched glass statues, BillingViews presents its first annual Pre-Awards Season BSS/OSS Honors. The Rules Our rules are simple. 1) Anyone in the space is eligible to win. 2) No one is allowed to apply. 3) There are no entries or nominations, so there are no entry or nomination fees. 4) We decide who wins because, well, we feel
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Despite the many advanced analytics tools coming to market across industries, it turns out that 76 percent of analysts use Microsoft Excel for their “self-serve” analytics projects. This is according to a new, cross-industry survey Lavastorm Analytics has conducted with 600 analytics users, technologists, managers and executives. It’s an overwhelming number, but it shouldn’t be surprising at all. You Can’t Beat the ROI I can say from personal experience that over the years I’ve created literally millions of dollars worth of analytical deliverables with Excel. Especially since 2007, when Microsoft upgraded Excel’s graphical tools and
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Picture a muscle bound brainiac, truculent yet cerebral, testosterone-driven yet deeply educated in software engineering; he is the “Bully Geek” and he represents what many large IT organizations have become. Anyone who has worked in software has encountered it or been a part of it – the closed-door IT shop with a “not invented here” philosophy and a “we know better than you Luddites” attitude. IT organizations like this often seize their business peers in a choke hold, controlling all things technical and tolerating no criticism or questioning of its assumptions. Okay, this is an overly
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