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Service Providers need to eliminate operational silos for effective Customer Experience Management says Subex

Need Metrics-Driven Customer Experience Management Systems to align customer experience with revenues and margins

Bangalore, INDIA: Subex Limited, a leading global provider of Operations and Business Support Systems (OSS/BSS), participated in an Insights Report released by the Telemangement Forum on Customer Experience Management (CEM), titled 'Customer Experience Management: Driving Loyalty and Profitability'. This report takes a close look at strategies for effective CEM to help service providers leverage customer loyalty to build profitability.

In the report, Subex provided a unique perspective on metrics-driven CEM strategies that will help Communication Service Providers (CSPs) optimize their CEM investments, resulting in quantifiable increases in margins, profitability, and customer retention. The true test of customer satisfaction and customer experience is the extent to which customers generate more revenue and profits for the service provider over time. However, the challenge service providers face is relating increases or decreases in indices such as Customer Satisfaction Index to changes in ARPU or AMPU in order to quantify the financial impact of customer satisfaction and customer experience.

Among service providers' primary CEM challenges is the lack of a 360-degree or end-to-end subscriber view based on products, services, profitability, revenues, margins, costs, geography and other parameters. With no comprehensive view of the subscriber, no real-time, coordinated mechanism to measure these customer parameters, and no defined KPIs to track customer experience across various touch points, service providers cannot establish and sustain a credible CEM approach. Typically in a service provider's operational environment subscriber data is fragmented across various systems and data sources, and it remains un-correlated and consequently under-utilized. OSS/BSS environments generally consist of thousands of systems, from Excel spreadsheets to large legacy mainframe systems to third-party solutions. These systems, in turn, are managed by hundreds of complex, often manual, processes and this complexity results in frequent process gaps and significant data inconsistencies between systems. This siloed approach also means that service providers have no mechanism to link customer satisfaction parameters to service provider processes. As a result there is no way to predict customer satisfaction from raw metrics such as product quality or service efficiency, giving service providers little, if any, guidance on where to invest to improve customer satisfaction.

Mark Nicholson, CTO, Subex Ltd says,"To correlate customer data across disparate functions for more effective CEM, service providers must first overcome the various challenges presented by operational silos. Effectively analyzing customer data depends on the accuracy of the processes that generate these data. A pragmatic way to ensure such accuracy and efficiency is to enable a ROC (Revenue Operations Center) strategy. A ROC essentially functions as 'mission control' for a service provider's financial health, coordinating often dispersed functions within the organization. Introducing systems that automate processes and generate subscriber and transactional information is also important for tracking and enhancing customer experience."

High-level summary data about customers (e.g., how each customer demographic experiences the service provider on average) has limited usefulness. The ROC collects data on individual subscribers to enable more effective CEM and enables service providers to identify high-risk subscribers (i.e., those likely to churn) and take corrective action. It correlates and analyzes data from a number of diverse sources (data warehouse, xDRs, billing, call center). The resulting real-time insights can guide service providers' actions and investments for sustaining an effective CEM strategy.

The ROC paves the way for Business Optimization, which, according to Analysys Mason's recent report on the billing market, Billing Market Review: 2008 - 2013 released in November 2009, will soon play a significant role in supporting Customer Experience Management (CEM). The same report has hailed Subex as the leader in Business Optimization for the second year running. Business Optimization focuses primarily on the profitability of the business - making sure they collect all the possible revenue, preventing fraud, managing inter-carrier expenses, retaining records for law enforcement, and monitoring the operational state of the business. Business Optimization is the sum total of business collections, network cost management, analytics, and data retention. It embraces a range of application areas that help CSPs run their business more profitably.

The CEM insights report is available for download at http://www.subex.com/CEM-P.php

Subex will be participating in TM Forum's Management World 2009 scheduled to be held at Rosen Shingle Creek at Orlando, Florida. It will be showcasing its market leading Business Optimization solutions, which have made it a world leader in the areas of Revenue Assurance, Fraud Management, Cost Management, Risk Management & Interconnect / Interparty Settlement and Data Integrity Management, at booth # 222.

Service Providers who wish to meet with Subex can contact Pete Tapley at pete.tapley@subex.com

About Subex Limited

Subex Limited is a leading global provider of Operations and BusinessSupport Systems (OSS/BSS) that empowers communications service providers (CSPs) to achieve competitive advantage through Business Optimization and Service Agility - thereby enabling them to better operational efficiency to deliver enhanced service experiences to subscribers. The company pioneered the concept of a Revenue Operations Center (ROC) – a centralized approach that sustains profitable growth and financial health through coordinated operational control.

Subex's product portfolio powers the ROC and its best-in-class solutions enable new service creation, operational transformation, subscriber-centric fulfillment, provisioning automation, revenue assurance, cost management, data integrity management, fraud management and interconnect / inter-party settlement.

Subex's customers include 36 of the world's 72 biggest* telecommunications service providers. The company has more than 300 installations across 70 countries.
* Forbes’ Global 2000 list, 2009

For more information please visit www.subex.com

Forward Looking and Cautionary Statements

Certain statements in this release concerning Subex's products, strategy and future growth prospects are forward-looking statements, which involve a number of risks, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, market acceptance of Subex's products and services, Subex's ability to implement its growth strategy, competition in Subex's areas of business and general economic conditions affecting the telecom industry.

Further information:

MEDIA CONTACT
Harshita Nair
PUBLIC AFFAIRS
+91 80 66964157
harshita.nair@subex.com

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Perfect Relations
+91 9892306446
vpadiyar@perfectrelations.com