The carriers are facing a major challenge in keeping relevant in the market and not just becoming the pipe that delivers content, says Consultant and former CIO at T-Mobile Rob Strickland. In conversation with Wikibon Co-Founder David Vellante and SilionAngle Founder John Furrier live from EMCworld 2011 on SiliconAngle.TV, he said, “to keep relevant you have to keep moving up the stack. Its very easy for people to just go over you, we've already seen that happen with the wireline carriers. So the challenge is how you package apps and content so you aren't just in the pipe business.”
Their problem is first they invest huge amounts of capex on building out their networks, moving to new generations with faster transmission speeds, and constantly improving coverage. Then they invest heavily in people to provide a good basic customer experience. And then on top of that they want to start distributing applications and content, because that is where the business is today. “The question becomes, what is your business.”
Furrier recalled the days when SMS was the big growth application on mobile and was developed by the carriers. “Now you look at the Apple App Store, and there is a tsunami of applications, all from third parties, crashing over those networks.” And content companies like Netflicks are also getting into the act.
One sure thing, Strickland says, is that customer experience is going to be vital for carriers whose basic value is the size of the audience they can deliver. A lot of Strickland's business today involves installing Greenplum (now a division of EMC) to capture huge amounts of data, much of it concerning customer experience with the carriers, and running ClickFox over that to analyze that data and find out what carriers can do to improve their customer experience.
Why is service at the big carriers so bad, Vellante asked. “You have a problem, so you call a service provider's help center, but you get routed to the wrong person, and they can't help you. You go back to the Web and can't find what you need there. You try the call center again, maybe send an IM or get into a chat session, but you still can't get what you need, and you end up with a very frustrating experience.”
The problem, Strickland said, is the carriers have had is that they are working blind because they have no visibility into the total user experience across multiple channels – voice calls, Web, SMS and IM, e-mail. So they tend to fix things organically, moving from one part of the problem to another, without ever seeing the whole from the customer viewpoint.
“We all leave footprints in the sand as we go through these experiences,” he said. “But very few companies can pour concrete over those footprints, pick them up, and say, 'Here is what happened.' That is what ClickFox does.”
Basically ClickFox analyzes the huge amounts of data captured in a Greenplum big data datamart to create the complete track of individual customers trying to find answers to issues. Then it analyzes large numbers of these to discover patterns that reveal common problems customers have with the carrier's customer service so that the carrier can redesign to eliminate those problems. And, he said, it does work as advertised.
Furthermore, the combination of ClickFox working over Greenplum can analyze an individual consumer's experience and what that customer needs in “real time”. That is important, he said, because “when a customer is down, he has very little patience with latency.” If the carrier cannot connect the customer with the right help quickly, that customer is gone. At the least that means the carrier has a chronic problem with dissatisfied customers who are then hard sells for additional services. At worst it means the carrier loses large numbers of customers, a situation the industry as seen multiple times in its short history.
So what does “real time” mean. Obviously some latency always exists. “I have defined it as near real time where the N is very small,” Strickland said.
Furrier suggested that it depends on the situation. When someone has a real emergency that latency needs to be very short, while for someone driving somewhere or waiting in line for coffee, the latency before he gets where he is going or gets his latte can be longer.
Vellante suggested the answer all agreed on. “Real time is just fast enough that you don't lose the customer.”
