The Imperative of Customer-Centric Operations

Customer satisfaction drives better performance in the market and increased company value. Unfortunately, as is evident from lagging NPS scores, traditional service providers including MSOs have not performed as well as other industries despite allocating a proportionally much larger share of human resources in customer care. In contrast, web scale providers allocate very limited human resources for customer care, but have much stronger customer intimacy. To make matters more challenging, customer preferences are evolving rapidly. Access to content is being diversified away from a single static subscription service delivery toward more granular consumption. Consumers and enterprises are demanding a more transactional model for personalized, context aware services that adapt rapidly to changes in need or demand. To meet these current and evolving challenges, MSOs must transform to a customer centric operations. The paradigm shifts from managing a network to delivering a service that delights the customer. Service customization, user control of their services and automatic adaptation of service delivery are the new requirements for operations. In this model of operations with capability to take autonomous actions, it is critical to define the optimum level of human responsibilities and the insights that they need to perform their functions. This paper presents four core principles of future operations: customer-centric automation, hyper-scale analytics, an open and programmable architecture, and cognitive awareness.