Tribold EPM for Product Experience

In order to truly optimise the customer experience, there is a vital dependency on optimising the product experience. The product experience is what underpins a satisfying customer experience: the products are what drive a customer to engage with a service provider; the diversity and attractiveness of offers and services are what generate additional revenue; and the quality and consistency of the use of those products is what keeps the customer loyal.

Ultimately, the customer experience is substantially defined by the customer’s interaction with the CSP’s products, from purchase, to delivery, to use, to payment. At the same time, communications products and services are no longer static, long-lived or few in number. CSPs are increasingly defined by the products they offer, and to stay competitive and deliver against customer expectations they must manage and refresh a complex and dynamic product portfolio. And to add further pressure, the increasingly competitive CSP market requires that service providers closely monitor how their products are performing, so that they can make better commercial and strategic decisions, and continually evolve their product strategy.

The business challenge behind the experience comes down to a basic premise: what should I be selling to my customers and what do I need to do to effectively deliver and manage that? So the successful retailers who deliver on customer experience are the ones adept at product management and at understanding the relationship between customers’ wants and needs and the products designed to fulfil them. However, delivering on this targeted style of customer management on a large scale is only possible through an “industrial” (ie automated and scalable) approach to designing and managing products; not through the “artisan” (ie labour-intensive) approach we commonly see throughout the industry.

The central role of Product in the customer experience

When we consider what the customer experience actually involves we quickly discover this is a rather more complex question than it first appears.

It encompasses far more than just customer service or customer service channels, as important as these are to the customer experience. Rather it is defined by the sum of all the touch-points a customer has with a CSP.

There are in fact a wide variety of touch-points that together create the customer experience. The common element throughout an end-to-end experience, as Figure 1 shows, is the product: the product is being offered, sold, provisioned, used, billed for, or enquired about at a given touch-point. The lure of a particular product offer is often what attracts a customer to a CSP in the first place. How these products perform in terms of delivering against the customer‘s evolving wants, needs or desires contributes substantially to customer satisfaction, retention, lifetime spending and support costs.

Figure 1. The central role of the product in the customer experience

The benefits of delivering a better product experience

Understanding, and ultimately managing, the key role that the product plays in the customer experience delivers a wide range of commercial, operational and customer benefits, as shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2. Benefits derived from better product experience management

Making the case for such an approach can be challenging, however, if trying to quantify the total losses as a result of a sub-optimal product experience: direct losses (such as higher operational costs and billing errors) are spread over a number of operational areas, while indirect costs (such as opportunity costs or sub-optimal competitive positioning) are notoriously difficult to quantify.

Alternatively, the upside of such an approach can be more easily quantified and even proven.

Four ways to deliver a better product experience

Deliver operational efficiency via a single cross-channel product reference source
Gain better understanding of product performance
Reduce billing queries and complaints
Deliver better performing products.

See which Tribold customers are focused on Product Experience by visiting our customer page >

Find out how Tribold EPM can help your organisation enhance the product experience for customers by reading the Product Experience report and by contract Tribold at info@tribold.com