Now, it's the CEO who is taking a hard look at what the company will have to do, and what tools it will have to develop or buy, in order to achieve the level of CRM that will differentiate itself from the competition. One of the keys to making CRM work is ensuring that the customer has a feeling of being treated as an individual who has some degree of control over meeting his or her own telecommunications needs. CoManage CEO and co-founder Dave Nelsen says ISM allows a service provider, for example, to see how much bandwidth a customer is using and, if that customer is bumping up against the amount of bandwidth subscribed to, offer the option of increasing the level of service. Customers also will be able to look into the network, to whatever degree the service provider allows, in order to see how the services are being utilized and to spot any problems. Such a solution can be of equal benefit to both the service provider and the customer.
Service providers can discover problems inside the network before their customers call to complain.
They can then call those customers, explain what the problem was and what has been or is being done about it, and what will be done to compensate the customer for any loss or degradation of service. At the same time, the customer can see how it is using the services it's paying for, to ensure it's getting the most bang for its buck, and even spot problems on its own that it can talk to the service provider about. Among the values of such a product is that the customer gets a greater sense of empowerment, and has greater control of the network and services to which it subscribes. Providing a Sense of Value An important aspect of CRM in today's world is, in fact, giving the customer a greater sense of self-worth, that the individual customer has real value to the carrier. It's for that very reason that service providers need to develop a new customer-centric attitude that looks beyond the network and the products and services that it can handle, and takes into consideration who the customer is and how the customer wants to be treated.