5.4 Customer Self Management

Diagram Description

Customer self empowered applications provide an internet technology driven interface to the customer to undertake a variety of business functions directly for themselves. These applications interact to provide fully automated service or assisted service over various customers touch points. Although customer self management applications primarily trigger functionality defined in the rest of the CRM, Service Management and Resource Management applications, they should also contain functionality specific to customer self empowerment. As service providers shift to multidimensional services, new business realities require self service systems to support the following criteria:

• One-and-done fulfillment across service portfolio (cf. Order Management Applications)
  
• Multi-disciplinary customer service (cf. Customer Service / Account Problem resolution applications)
  
• Sync multi-channel interoperability
  
• Total convergent self directed billing (view/pay/dispute all) (cf. Front Office Customer Billing Management applications)
  
• Reconciliation interoperability
  
• Personalization and usability
  
• Visualization of SLAs across subscribed services (cf. Customer Service / Account Problem resolution applications)
  
• Portfolio driven guided selling (cf. Product Catalogue, Product Lifecycle Management applications)
  
• Leveraging the 360 degree customer view (cf. Customer Information Management Application)
  
  Customer self management applications enable service providers to increase profitability across the organization by optimizing the customer experience and maximizing the efficiency of business operations through:
  
• Rapid order-to-activation mechanism across service portfolio
  
• Commodity like enablement for telecom services (rapid introduction; easy amendment; cross bundling)
  
• Universal platform supporting multiple users (consumers; business; dealers) and multiple LOBs (wire line; wireless; IPTV) though single point of contact
  
• Reducing costs through operating efficiencies
  

These operations expect to gain more customer loyalty, service stickiness and ARPU for the service provider. A primordial factor for increasing ARPU through self empowered systems is high usability. High usability requires channel agnostic consistency and seamless customer experience leveraging functionality that is driven from sporadic backend systems. For that, self empowered systems should provide integration readiness through several vehicles:

• Pre-integrated self service system including stand-alone web framework or integration front end with a portal engine
  
• Self services layer exposing atomic Webservices/APIs for reuse by multiple systems across the architectural environment
  
• Portlets driven connectivity exposing data and services interoperability through a portal engine or web application.
  

Typically the portal to the customer is via a web-based interface. Customer self care is increasingly popular with both customers and operators as it usually provides access to information 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and does not have the frustration of waiting for a free call agent. Customer self-care systems can take a number of forms from a controlled ‘secure window’ application into the underlying OSS systems used internally by the operator for the customer to view and pay his invoices to a complete portal where the customer can manage his entire relationship with the operator. Customer Self Management applications need to provide a level of security to protect both the customer’s data and the integrity of the underlying systems. They should also be capable of providing single sign on capabilities to access Business and Operational Support Systems.
In functional terms customer self-management generally provides a comprehensive collection of self-service functionality supporting all stages of the customer life cycle, Registration and fulfillment, Assurance and Billing Management activities. As the various features provided for customer lifecycle management are often portlet type applications that are integrated to a CSP’s overall customer self management portal, the self management applications can be broken down into 3 major applications:

• Customer Self Empowered Fulfillment Applications
  
• Customer Self Empowered Assurance Applications
  
• Customer Self Empowered Billing Applications
  

These will be discussed in more detail in the following sections.

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This was created from the Frameworx 16.0 Model