Telecoms to Enterprise Customers: We Still Don't Hear You

You'd think that the first rule of business would be to understand what your customers want so you can make them and your accountants happy. But looking at the data from a recent Accenture study, you quickly come to the conclusion that in some basic ways, telecom carriers are largely out of touch with the interests of their large enterprise customers when it comes to something as basic as billing, and they're losing money as a result.

The study questioned executives at 100 carriers as well as 100 buyers of enterprise telephony at Fortune 500 firms. You'd think that the size of such accounts and the cost of acquiring them would make telecom companies sit up and pay attention, particularly when it came to that foundational question of billing and payment. Not at all.

Accenture found that only 27 percent of the customers said that their carriers "had a full understanding of their wants and needs as related to billing." This shouldn't be a surprise to the carriers, only nine percent of which thought they had a full understanding.

"Fifteen percent of the carriers said that billing had a strong influence on customer loyalty, but 43 percent of the enterprise customers did," says Rob Purks, an Accenture senior executive in the billing practice. "Seventy percent [of the customers] said billing was important to the relationship." Even more surprising is that while 84 percent of the customers said that efficiently resolving billing issues is very important, only 12 percent of the carriers gave it that sort of weight.

According to Purks, this difference represented a "disconnect and investment in the wrong place." My own read is that it is more of a gulf of understanding that frankly should be inconceivable in a corporation. This information essentially says that the carriers haven't a clue as to what is most important to their big customers and that most haven't even bothered to try and figure it out. Fifty-six percent of carriers say that they don't measure enterprise satisfaction in regards to billing, but why should they? They clearly have never asked their customers how important it was.

One caveat: clearly those people who purchase telephony services are going to be more concerned with the nuts and bolts of billing than upper management. However, that doesn't really matter. Telecom companies may keep focusing on trying to distinguish themselves in terms of services, but the technical playing field is pretty flat. "The reality is that customers assume that telecommunication services are going to work," Purks says. "When you look at the only documents that go in front of the customers on a monthly basis are their bills, [it becomes clear that] carriers are not viewing billing as a strategic capability but rather a necessary one."

Because the technical capabilities are so even, customers have extensive choices available to them. That means if the actual purchasers become displeased with billing, they can direct a change in telecom service and it will be virtually invisible to the C-suite. In fact, according to the survey, a full ten percent of the enterprises had switched telecom carriers specifically because of dissatisfaction with the billing process. An additional one percent was considering such a change. This is even more significant when you think that the logistics of switching would represent a major effort on the part of the customer.

The billing problems also result from the systems that the carriers have in place, says Purks (though, to be fair, Accenture is interested in selling consulting services in this area):

The underlying architectures that many carries are using today haven't been optimized to enable billing capabilities that allow competitive differentiation, nor have they optimized their operational cost. Essentially in some cases, carries have multiple billers by market. To create a nationwide product under that scenario, carriers -- have to develop that capability multiple times. They're supporting IT operations and licenses for multiple billers and trying to evolve them in parallel. -- There have been a couple of root causes for this. One has been acquisition and not effectively consolidating billing architecture. And one approach to introduce new products has been to introduce additional billers to their architecture. Many of these architectures are very fragmented, they're expensive to maintain, and they're difficult to evolve.

All this comes after decades of being in business. You'd think that telecom executives might realize that finding out what their customers want is as easy as picking up a phone.

Telephone image via Flickr user Ali Smiles :), CC 2.0.