IPTV and personalisation - delivering the exceptional customer experience

 

The emergence of IPTV as a serious alternative to traditional home entertainment services, such as cable or satellite TV, gives consumers great hope that a significantly improved customer experience has arrived (writes John Konczal, Global Industry Executive for Communications and Media at Sterling Commerce).

Home entertainment services have long lagged behind other communications and entertainment services, such as wireless service offerings, when it comes to giving customers more options to personalise their service to their individual needs. Today, it is quite commonplace for a wireless service consumer to be able to personalise their service from a myriad of different voice, data, and messaging services and of course, multiple hardware and accessory options.

Personalisation is quickly becoming a common feature of many consumer experiences including how they buy goods and services and even how they use their on-line services. In the world of home entertainment, such personalisation opportunities are few and far between. IPTV, with its advanced network technology, gives service providers the ability to deliver that personalised experience that consumers want and demand.   

The compelling personalised buying experience

Personalisation in a communications services context means giving the customer the ability to control their service experience. It means enabling customers to select and change the services and options they buy, allowing them to tailor their service experience to their own unique interests at anytime. Such personalisation creates a compelling buying experience for consumers because they are in complete control of their own experience and it creates freedom of choice by removing common barriers that currently create a less than satisfactory customer experience.

IPTV networks, which send information over secure, managed, high capacity networks, empower IPTV service provides to deliver the personalisation that customers desire.   For example, IPTV providers can offer customers channel personalisation and network technology, such as a return channel, and presents entirely new ways for customers to personalise their viewing experience and interact directly to influence their quality of service.

It is even possible to enable customers to interact directly and make real-time purchases of items seen while watching their favourite programme. Such technological capabilities can deliver customers the choice and interactivity they need to make real-time selections of the services and options that are tuned to their specific needs at that specific time.

Beyond technology: focus on the customer

Network technology alone cannot deliver true customer personalisation however. An IPTV provider’s entire customer management and service delivery infrastructure must be built with customer personalisation in mind. Take for example pricing and billing systems and processes. In the typical cable provider infrastructure, pricing and billing is fairly static where a customer is charged a monthly fee for the services and options they have purchased.

Limited service changes can be made, that usually result in a pro-rated fee based on when the change was made during the month.  But in the world of IPTV, services can be changed at any time and possibly even multiple times during a day. The IPTV provider’s pricing and billing systems and processes must be enabled to support such dynamic change.

IPTV providers need to embrace real-time transaction-based pricing and billing that can price a customer’s real-time selection and accurately render a charge to the customer’s regular bill or possibly in real-time to the customer’s charge card. There is also an opportunity to embrace value-based pricing, setting prices that reflect considerations such as the value of the content and how the customer consumes– such as public broadcast, on-demand viewing, or download-to-own.

  

How a customer elects to manage their personalisation options is also a key consideration for IPTV providers. Customers may want to select an on-demand movie to watch or select a new channel to watch when they arrive home from work on any one day. The customer wants the flexibility to make this selection whenever they want, wherever they are – maybe consuming the content on their PC or even their smartphone.

Customers demand a true multi-channel customer experience where they can personalise their service from any number of interaction channels. This multi-channel experience is another means for IPTV providers to combine the flexibility and interactivity of the network with personalisation-focused customer management tools to create a truly compelling and differentiated customer experience.

Looking forward

   

As IPTV emerges as a true alternative to traditional home entertainment services, it is becoming clear that this new service type has the potential to deliver a vastly improved customer experience. But growth of IPTV revenue streams and gains in market share will not be based solely upon the customer personalisation capabilities delivered by IPTV network technology.

An IPTV provider’s ability to enable customer personalisation across its whole customer management and service delivery systems and processes will play a critical and differentiating role. Every interaction must provide the customer with a personal and involving experience to build trust in their brand, generate service uptake and ultimately grow revenues.

About Sterling Commerce

Sterling Commerce (an AT&T company) is working with some of the top European media companies to improve their customers’ experience by making sure that there is a seamless transition between different selling channels. So whether customers are making transactions through the high street store, online or over the phone, it will remain a single experience.

Source: IPTV-News