With all the disruptive change in the cable industry over the last year, cable engineers have been fielding numerous curve balls as they work to keep their organizations ahead of the on-the-go consumer. Looking ahead through the rest of 2017, we predict that, among (many) other things, the heads of your cable operations will expect new innovation and further disruption and will ask their cable engineering talent to stretch their capabilities in three key areas: customer experience, the Internet of Things (IoT), and customer care.
Creating a Differentiated Customer Experience
The customer experience has come a long way, even just in the past year, with much more video content moving from the set-top box to streaming across any number of devices. Ultimately, the loud voices of consumers who want real-time, convenient access to their favorite shows is driving the moves that the industry makes, and ultimately, will drive new changes in the way we engineer the new customer experience.
First, ease of navigation will become critical to the customer experience this year. Viewers don’t want to be burdened with separately searching their cable catalog, Netflix, HBO Go, and others to find out which service has season 2 of their favorite show – according to our market data, they want a central search location that brings all of their recommended and stored content together.
To facilitate this, cloud-based technologies will earn a new place in the cable operational infrastructure. The cloud can open a new world of options to make faster or experimental changes to digital content services and reduce the time from concept to launch. In the past, it could take months to configure new services across multiple product catalog, ordering, billing, rating, provisioning systems and many others. Operators often don’t have the time or resources it would take to completely transform its BSS to exploit new market opportunities each time. A cloud-based, overlay approach allows new services to be launched quickly, with minimum impact on incumbent platforms.
IoT and the Connected Home
We’ve been hearing about IoT for some time now, and questioning where the tipping point will be for operators to begin earning real revenues from the world of connected devices.
IoT has introduced a whole new caliber of connectivity to consumers’ daily routines (and expectations). The IoT-driven customer experience will become more sophisticated across all industry verticals in 2017. The cable industry is not exempt from this transformation – and is uniquely positioned to become the epicenter of it.
Cable has the opportunity to develop the universal language needed for IoT devices to speak to each other – and to shift from its current role as a video content aggregator into an aggregator of smart home services. This year, forward-looking cable engineers will be tasked with creating an infrastructure that enables cable companies to evolve from a content aggregator into a device-agnostic, interactive platform for smart dishwashers, thermostats, washing machines – and of course, video content.
Moving Toward Touchless Customer Care and Service
For the foreseeable future, there will still be need to offer a friendly voice on the other end of the phone through a call center, and to send a technician in-person to provide a personal touch to service for a home or business customer. But throughout the rest of this year, there will also be the rise of omni-channel care, creating a single view of the customer in a coordinated, strategic way that offers a common customer experience regardless of the delivery channel.
Consumers interact with their subscriber accounts across devices and communications channels, making it essential for account information to appear consistently, whether delivered as a PDF statement or a simple mobile-friendly summary of charges. New technologies that allow cable operators to compose a billing statement once, then prioritize and present the information pertinent to each channel consistently, will make statements easier for consumers to understand and reduce costly call enter transactions and truck rolls. In addition, artificial intelligence sources like Alexa, Facebook, or Google Home will increasingly assist with customer service needs, and need to interact with both the cable operator and the consumer. This expansion to all communications types will ensure a closed loop of customer engagement is realized regardless of channel.
The Digital Transformation Is Never Over, and Cable Can Stay Ahead
The cable landscape continues to evolve and transform every day and the bottom line is that cable engineers will need to rely on the most nimble and flexible approaches possible to help their organizations keep pace. So how will you be asked to push the boundary of what customers can expect from their cable operator through the rest of 2017? We’re several weeks in, and it looks like a busy year.
Chad Dunavant is VP of product management at CSG International.
