I’ll be speaking this month in Prague, chairing the Churn & Customer Value Management in Telecoms conference. Some great speakers have been lined up (O2 UK, Tele2, 3UK, TTNET, Vodafone etc). I’ll be keeping a live blog / Twitter stream throughout the event. If you are planning to attend, feel free to connect with me in advance. More information at http://www.churnandcvmintelecoms.com Continue reading Churn & Customer Value Management in Telecoms
Customer Journey Mapping has become an important exercise for mobile operators looking to improve the customer experience. Here are some best practice guidelines for anyone thinking of running a journey mapping project. The customer journey (how your customer progress through your business from acquisition and beyond) is typically “owned” by several functional groups within a business. This makes customer journey mapping is a worthwhile exercise. It focuses the organization around a common goal where the outcome is improved Customer Lifetime Value (profitability & retention) and not just P&L improvements within individual functional areas of a business. However, conducting a customer … Continue reading Customer Journey Mapping
Technology and telecommunications companies have, for too long, relied on three increasingly obsolete business principles. That population expansion will ensure their growth, that R&D investment will protect their futures and that creating uniqueness in their offers will insulate them from … Continue reading Marketing: Repaving the Yellow Brick Road
In an interview with the Financial Times this week, HTC CEO Peter Chou talked of the company launching a tablet in the near future. He stated that the product would be disruptive. Disruptive. What a nebulous statement that has become. I’m sure it resonates well among the investment community keen to see HTC’s fortunes reenergized, but for folks within the technology space it’s difficult to see the form in which HTC’s tablet disruption will manifest. Industrial Design: HTC has some pedigree here. The HTC One smartphone is a beautiful piece of industrial design, milled from a single block of aluminium, … Continue reading “Disruptive”. Investor-pleasing rhetoric with little substance?
After two days at [another] customer experience conference I’m getting increasingly disillusioned and disappointed in the telcoms industry that I love. At least 50% of presentations from mobile operators and vendors focused almost exclusively on Net Promoter Score (NPS). This 10 year old measurement technique has become a crutch for the industry; if your NPS is better than your competitors then your customer experience must be great and you’ll have loyal customers. Right? Wrong, wrong, wrong. Now, I agree that NPS is a useful satisfaction and advocacy metric. But it’s just one tool that needs wider context and needs to be complimented by wider … Continue reading Hiding behind NPS because “It sounds about right”…
I’m not singling out Ikea here, there’s a list of guilty advertisers that should also take note of what I’m about to say. When telling your customers how they can shop with you, stop mixing platforms with the adjective for connectedness, “online”. It’s become de rigueur for many brands to add a strap along the lines of; “Instore, Online, Mobile” to their advertising. But it’s meaningless and makes you sound naive . The lines between different forms of connectivity have blurred too much for this to make any sense. I can be online on my mobile. I’m assuming that by online, they mean their website (as … Continue reading It’s 2013. Having a website, even an app, is no longer a badge of honour
Who wants to be tied to the same mobile device for two years? Published in today’s Telecom.com (on behalf of WDS, A Xerox Company), my views on the future of the mobile device subsidy and the growing misalignment between operator business models and hardware innovation lifecycles. Continue reading The same device for two years?
When I first read this headline, I had to check that it wasn’t 1st April. Could Sky, a television and communications business, really have forced Microsoft to rename its cloud storage solution, Skydrive? My first reaction was one of incredulity (I thought Apple had the market for petty legal attacks in the bag). In its case, BskyB made reference to customers who, having had problems with Skydrive, contacted the broadcaster’s helpline for support rather than go to Microsoft. Read through the court transcripts and there are only seventeen such cases of this occurring. Across all of its operating markets the … Continue reading Skydrive: A case of mistaken identity
Oh BlackBerry, you do infuriate me. Sometimes I think you forget that you now have two distinct form factors in your line-up. How else can you explain broadcasting device-ambiguous #BB10Tips through your @BlackBerryHelp Twitter account? Some are self-evident; “Swipe down”…ok, … Continue reading BlackBerry’s device ambiguity
In the smartphone camera vs digital SLR debate I’ve come to the conclusion that technical comparisons are irrelevant. For me it’s a question of curation, narcissism and Starbuck’s Lattes. A post on The Verge about smartphone photography has really got … Continue reading Is all smartphone photography narcissistic?
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