How Service Providers Win: Part 4 – Empower Customers
In this eight-part series, we examine the myriad ways service providers can get an edge over their competition, launch and monetize new services, attract new customers and, ultimately, increase revenue. Essentially, we discuss how service providers can win in this ever-evolving environment.
Customer empowerment is a major component of modern service provider success. It’s a part of customer satisfaction that is rarely talked about.
Why?
Because there’s a desire to be needed by a customer; and when they’re empowered to do things themselves, there’s a perception that service providers are no longer indispensable.
But it’s actually quite the opposite.
When you implement or enhance the self-service capabilities you offer, you give your customers the freedom to tune services to meet their specific needs.
Putting that control into the customers’ hands has powerful benefits.
Reduce Support Volume
First, giving your customers the ability to use services how they want means you don’t have to do it for them. That equals fewer calls, fewer emails and fewer chats. That means less hours spent tuning customer services, and more time spent on other imperative customer service activities.
Save Money
Fewer support calls cuts costs. Instead of paying techs and support staff to manually tune each customer’s specific service demands, you can put resources toward improving your offerings, speeding your time to market and beating your competition. You not only save money on support staff, but the money you do spend is no longer being dumped into a cost center and instead is being put toward innovation and differentiation.
Enable Personalization
Modern architectures like software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) empower you to offer more personalized services to customers, which leads to deeper subscriber and application awareness. Automating the ability to create customized and personalized services on a per-subscriber and per-application basis ensures customers have a consistent experience while you can have a service offering that’s a key differentiator.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
A happy customer stays a customer. No one has ever left a service provider because they’re happy with the service and they are satisfied. Empowering the customer through self-service puts them in the driver’s seat and gives them control. That plus not having to wait on endless support calls to accomplish a seemingly simple task will keep your customers happy, and keep you happy as well.
Those are just some of the ways empowering your customers can improve your business as a service provider. We’re sure there are more. What ways do you empower your customers? Leave a comment below and let us know.
To discover first-hand how A10 Networks delivers innovative secure application delivery services for the world’s top service providers, contact us today.
Eight Part Series
- How Service Providers Win: Part 1 – Prepare for What’s Next
- How Service Providers Win: Part 2 – Reduce Costs
- How Service Providers Win: Part 3 – Build Consistency
- How Service Providers Win: Part 4 – Empower Customers
- How Service Providers Win: Part 5 – Faster Time to Market
- How Service Providers Win: Part 6 – Deploy On Your Terms
- How Service Providers Win: Part 7 – Flex Your Pricing Prowess
- How Service Providers Win: Part 8 – Strength Through Security
Seeing is believing.
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