Category: (1) TAM Application Type
Application Identifier: 5.4
Maturity Level: 4
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:
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
Reducing costs through operating efficiencies
These operations expect to gain more customer loyalty, service stickiness and ARPU for the service provider. A primary 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:
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:
These will be discussed in more detail in the following sections.
This was created from the Frameworx 16.0 Model