Mobile operators in Western Europe could generate annual opex savings of $4.6 billion if they implement omni-channel customer relationship management (CRM).
The term omni-channel refers to providing consistent customer service using any number of methods, including in-store, over the phone, via SMS and social media, or a self-help app.
Research carried out by Swedish consultancy Northstream on behalf of Chinese billing specialist AsiaInfo found that while telcos have adopted new means of interacting with customers, they operate in isolated silos that do not provide a holistic picture of a subscriber. An omni-channel approach stitches together these various channels to create a consistent view of the customer.
"Knowledge about customers at the service provider end is becoming more and more incomplete as the different channels are not sharing their respective customer data. For instance, a customer’s online/self-service transactions or dialogue with a call centre are often not visible to staff at the stores," said Northstream CEO Bengt Nordström, in a statement on Thursday.
"The operators we interviewed all admitted that to improve customer satisfaction they need to improve seamless customer experience across all channels," he said.
According to Northstream, approximately 20% of the $4.6 billion worth of savings generated by omni-channel CRM would come from cutting out duplicated workloads for customer service agents.
Another 30% would be generated by streamlining and automating various IT and back office costs. In addition, omni-channel CRM also has the potential to improve net promoter score (NPS), leading to a 10% reduction in annualised churn, which in turn lowers retention costs.
"The research highlights that as business models have moved from single to multi-channel customer interactions, a lot of complexity and manual processes have been added," said Andy Tiller, vice president of product marketing at AsiaInfo. "Omni-channel is the answer to reduce that complexity and provide a streamlined process to deliver better CRM and significant savings to the business."
