Why Customer Experience Index is the Future

A recent article by Analysys Mason highlighted the emergence of customer experience index (CEI) as a measure. Older measures of customer satisfaction (such as NPS) are limited in their accuracy and usefulness. Such methods offer static snapshots of experience which don’t relate to satisfaction, help CSPs understand what is influencing the score, or reveal what can be done to change it.

The Power of CEI

CEI has emerged as a more dynamic way of measuring experience that is granular (monitoring individual experience), directly correlated with events the customer has experienced (using hundreds of parameters), actionable and, most importantly, near real-time in nature.

Implementing Customer Experience Index

While CEI offers a step change in understanding real customer experience, what drives it and how it can be improved, implementing such a measure isn’t straightforward, because it requires access to real-time network data combined with AI/ML to deliver insight, and then make this actionable. Thus, its adoption has gone hand in hand with the roll out of 5G networks and increasing network automation. A Catalyst project by TM Forum, for example, explored how CSPs could deliver an autonomous CEI based on digital twin technology and machine learning algorithms.

Accurate, real-time network data is a vital input to CEI, but is only one dimension of experience. To add another, the TM Forum catalyst incorporated crowdsourced data to ensure perceived customer experience was also captured. Also required is a range of other data – such as device and service performance, as well as customer service interactions and performance.

To effectively implement CEI, CSPs need to integrate:

• Real-time network data streams

• Advanced AI/ML analytics

• Crowdsourced feedback to measure perceived customer experience

• Device and service performance metrics

• Customer interaction history

From reactive to proactive customer care

It’s critical that CSPs move beyond simply reacting to problems. Taking proactive measures that reduces customer frustration is an essential component in automating care, reducing costs and alleviating the burden on call centers. The data used for CEI can be used to trigger proactive, targeted messaging campaigns which anticipate customers’ informational needs.

For example, if there’s an outage in a specific locality, proactive messaging can target affected customers to explain what’s happened and how long it’s going to take to resolve – reducing customer effort by removing the need for them to queue for answers.

Moving beyond proactivity, cutting-edge CSPs aim to anticipate customer pain points and resolve them before they even become a problem.

Julia Martinez Arenas, Customer Experience Manager, Telefónica Global, says:

“There’s a need to anticipate the customers’ pain points and proactively implement autonomous solutions before any degradation in services occurs…Having a personalized and real time customer satisfaction index is key to fine tuning some new services in 5G, such as network slicing, and allows zero-touch automation to solve or mitigate any issues that may impact our customer's experience.”

Leveraging CEI data to boost revenue

Acting preventatively not only maximizes customer satisfaction by removing points of frustration, but also minimizes care costs both directly (the cost of handling inquiries) and indirectly (the impact of frustrated customers, such as compensation and churn).

Preventative care supports targeted intervention before customer relationships are irreversibly damaged – isolating groups of customers that have had a poor experience for outbound customer care calls, compensation or other interventions. This is important because intervening sooner significantly lowers the cost of churn prevention and accurately understanding churn factors means that churn prevention can be targeted more precisely (also saving money).   

Conversely, data can also be used to predict which customers would be most open to upgrading or buying additional products – based on their behaviour, context and experience in the last 30 days. By designing active micro-campaigns, CSPs are more likely to be successful in upselling or cross-selling and less likely to frustrate customers with inappropriate messaging.

How Subtonomy helps

Implementing CEI and the capabilities described throughout this blog isn’t just possible – it’s easier and more effective with Subtonomy.

We provide the foundation CSPs need to deliver a real-time, actionable Customer Experience Index:

• Accurate, real-time technical data across network, device, and service layers

• Our unique ActiveNPS product, correlating service delivery with customer perception

• Tools that power proactive outreach and predictive analytics for smarter, automated care

  
  

Whether you're aiming to reduce churn, boost satisfaction, or enable zero-touch automation, Subtonomy equips you with the insights and tools to make it happen.

Ready to bring CEI to life in your organization?

Contact us today for a personalized demo and see what’s possible with Subtonomy.