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Customer Experience – Contract Negotiations

"Suspicion and doubt lead to animosity and hatred." Ralph Steadman. To expand upon the first post in this Customer Experience series, which was on Product Evaluation, today's post relates to the next step, forming a contract between the customer and the winning bidder. The customer experience during the contract negotiation stage basically revolves around suspicion. Customers are a scarce commodity for even the largest vendors. As…

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06/01/2015 No Comments

Customer Experience – Product Evaluation

"Fear cannot be banished, but it can be calm and without panic; it can be mitigated by reason and evaluation" Vannevar Bush. In the Christmas Day blog, I indicated that I was going to begin a series on how OSS vendors / integrators can start with the customer experience and work back to improve their own products, services and systems. Today's blog is the first in…

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02/01/2015 No Comments

Can you make a better burger than McDonalds?

"The biggest threat to McDonald's lies within - and that is us as a company becoming complacent. There are a lot of companies that get fat, dumb and happy and take their eye off the ball and forget about serving customers." Charlie Bell. How many of you could make a better burger than McDonalds? Chances are that almost 100% of you will answer that question with…

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01/01/2015 No Comments

A balance of two rare OSS assets

"Every company's greatest assets are its customers, because without customers there is no company." Michael LeBoeuf. When a vendor is seeking growth (and that's most!), they focus on building up a strong customer base. As Michael LeBoeuf states above, an OSS vendor's greatest asset is its customers because of their relative scarcity. It makes sense that a vendor should be doing everything in its power to…

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31/12/2014 No Comments

Comptel wins Telefonica Group Customer in Chile

Comptel Has Won a New Telefonica Group Customer in Chile. Comptel’s Fulfillment deal is a part of the Telefonica de Chile Quad-Play transformation project that will enable improved customer experience for integrated wireline, wireless, Internet and TV services. With the Telefonica de Chile deal Comptel enters a new market in South America. The order value exceeds 1.2 million EUR, comprising Comptel Provisioning and Activation and Comptel Catalog software…

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31/12/2014 No Comments

Do you start with a question?

"If you torture the data long enough, it will confess." Ronald Coase. A subscriber to this blog named Paul recently asked a very thought-provoking question in relation to the context of data within this earlier post. He asked whether by "context" I meant that you come at the data with a question in mind that you're looking to solve. My definition of "context" is slightly different,…

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30/12/2014 No Comments

Features tell, benefits sell

"The most common thing that pegs an entrepreneur as an amateur is when they come in and immediately start talking about their amazing new technology, and forget to start the discussion with, “What big problem in the market am I trying to solve?” If they don’t start with the problem, then I know they are green." Dina Routhier. In the post from Christmas Day, I used…

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29/12/2014 No Comments

Upstream marketing and the big moves in OSS

"Upstream marketing focuses on innovation. It tries to answer two questions: where the market is moving and what customers will want next." Scott Thompson here on Chron.com. As indicated in yesterday's post, I have a series of posts coming up shortly that will look at the customer experience and how OSS might look at doing things better. Another perspective on the same message is how that…

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26/12/2014 No Comments

The gift of giving

"Christmas is the spirit of giving without a thought of getting. It is happiness because we see joy in people. It is forgetting self and finding time for others. It is discarding the meaningless and stressing the true values." Thomas S. Monson. Don’t worry, I’m not actually writing about OSS on our Christmas Day holiday here in Australia. I spooled this up for post a while…

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25/12/2014 No Comments

Explain the why before the how

"He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." Friedrich Nietzsche. A recent post posed the question, "have you noticed that the more technically proficient your customer is, the more likely you are to receive their specifications as "required solutions" rather than requirements?" To put this another way, the customer is telling you how to do it before telling you why they…

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24/12/2014 No Comments

Training with contextual data

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” Harry S Truman. In recent blogs, “Data Architecture Levels” and “Testing Architecture Levels,” the need for contextually relevant data has been mentioned. One of the other areas where contextually relevant data is essential, but very often ignored, is in training delivery. For the purposes of creating generic, repeatable training packages to ensure efficient delivery of…

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23/12/2014 No Comments

Testing architecture layers

"Beware of the problem of testing too many hypotheses; the more you torture the data, the more likely they are to confess, but confessions obtained under duress may not be admissible in the court of scientific opinion." Stephen M. Stigler. In a recent post, entitled "Data Architecture Layers," we discussed the need to architect data from the perspective of both format and context. The context perspective…

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22/12/2014 No Comments

The handshake analogy

"We left the meeting with a list of open issues, not a handshake." David Sacks. "Best-of-breed versus single vendor" is an age-old discussion point between OSS exponents. There is no right answer to this argument, with every customer having different needs. However, when speaking about the best-of-breed model, I sometimes use the handshake analogy to describe why we should aim to limit the number of disparate…

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19/12/2014 No Comments

Backed into a corner

"As soon as we feel attacked or backed into a corner, it’s almost inevitable we will fall into “Fight” or “Flight.”" Dr Stephen Samuel Lomax. When a CSP has been backed into a corner by their OSS vendor, when for whatever reason the OSS is not delivering what the CSP needs but they are locked into the existing OSS, have you noticed that a fight or…

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18/12/2014 No Comments

State Bank of India signs Amdocs

Amdocs, in Association with Triotech, to Enable SBI-BSNL Mobile Financial Services to Millions of Unbanked Households in Rural India. Amdocs announced the selection of its Mobile Financial Services solution, in association with Triotech's solution, that will enable State Bank of India (SBI) to offer mobile financial services to India's unbanked and under-banked population, using the mobile network of Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited's (BSNL). The solution will…

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17/12/2014 No Comments

Vodafone Hutchison Australia deploys Amdocs SON

Vodafone Hutchison Australia Deploys Amdocs Self-Optimizing Networks Solution. Amdocs announced that Vodafone Hutchison Australia has deployed Amdocs Self-Optimizing Networks (SON) solution to help with the program to improve its 4G coverage and customer experience across Australia. The solution helps Vodafone to free up 850 MHz spectrum previously used for 3G, so that it can be used for LTE. The 850 MHz spectrum is the most widely…

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17/12/2014 No Comments

SingTel selects Amdocs for billing

SingTel selects Amdocs for billing project. Asian telecom service provider SingTel has selected Amdocs for a billing project in Singapore and Australia to enhance and differentiate its customer experience. Amdocs will migrate the billing and customer support for retail, enterprise and government users of SingTel onto a single platform. SingTel, which has a stake in Bharti Airtel in India, aims to improve the customer satisfaction and…

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17/12/2014 No Comments

DST Selects CSG

DST Selects CSG to Support Wholesale Business Efficiencies CSG International announced that DST, a leading provider of communications services in Brunei, has expanded its strategic partnership with CSG. DST has been a CSG client for nearly 15 years. Under the terms of the expanded agreement, CSG will consolidate wholesale business and settlement operations for DST using CSG Route and the newest release of CSG Interconnect. The…

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17/12/2014 No Comments

The easy trumps the important

"That's been one of my mantras - focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it's worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains." Steve Jobs. What’s the most important task you have to work on today? I’ve noticed that the complex OSS projects…

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17/12/2014 No Comments

Data architecture layers

"It's our challenges and obstacles that give us layers of depth and make us interesting. Are they fun when they happen? No. But they are what make us unique." Ellen DeGeneres. I love looking at data and making sense of it for transferring, sharing and leveraging between systems. There are two distinct layers that the data architect must relate to: Format - this relates to the…

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16/12/2014 No Comments