“Feedback is the breakfast of champions.”
Kenneth Blanchard.
Many CSPs are realising the benefits, to themselves and their customers, by diversifying their customer touch points to include new channels. This includes offering self-help and “instant” customer interaction channels (ie web chat, instant messaging, social networking, etc) in addition to the traditional channels such as email, retail outlets, call centres, leaving messages via web forms, etc.
It is the speed of interaction, and hopefully issue resolution, that makes these new channels compelling for users.
For the CSPs, these new touch-points are proving to be cheaper to operate and word of net (ie word of mouth via social media) is providing powerful customer endorsement of brands that are able to respond significantly faster than their competitors.
Analytics are the powerful tools required to support the diversity of touch-points. It has the ability to turn the increased data collection into the opportunity to better understand customers and identify commonalities in the issues that they are experiencing. However, the value of the analytics is only as powerful as the feedback mechanisms that resolve the new-found knowledge.
B/OSS are the data collection engines used by intelligent analytics to produce continual improvement. But then B/OSS are often also the tools where this intelligence is then fed back into the system via process refinements, CRM scripts, network tweaks to improve throughput and reliability, re-balancing resourcing to accommodate newly identified trends, etc, etc.