CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE

4Ps OF MARKETING: Earlier, the 4Ps of marketing namely Product, Place, Price, and Promotion were sufficient to keep the customer interested. The brand successfully employing the 7Ps of marketing was likely to get a good market share. The 4 Ps were the controllable elements: 1. Product: refers to the physical product or service offered to the consumer. Product decisions include aspects such as function, appearance, packaging, service, warranty, etc. 2. Place: place or placement decisions are those associated with channels or distribution that serves as the means of getting the product to the target customers. The distribution system performs transactional, logistical, and facilitating functions. 3. Price: pricing decisions should take into account profit margins and the profable pricing response of competitors. Pricing includes not only the price list, but also discounts, financing and leasing. 4. Promotion: promotion decisions are those related to communicating and selling to potential consumers. Since these costes can be large in proportion to the product price, a break even analysis should be performed while making promotion decisions. Promotion decision involves advertising, public relations, media types, etc.

INCREASING COMPETITION IN THE MARKET: With limited competition in the market, this marketing strategy worked for the service providers. But as the competition grew, with more and more service providers entering the telecom arena, the same marketing strategy became obsolete. To stay in the market, all the brands tried to come up with the 4Ps in the best possible way. And thus there was no point of differentiation between the brands. No matter what brand customer chose, they were being offered the same kind of services-.. so the term brand loyalty wasnt into existence. The customer chose any brand randomly to meet his requirements. 4Ps NO LONGER ENOUGH: DIFFERENTIATION HAS TO BE CREATED Eventually the brand that was earning high revenues because of having a stringent control over the marketing strategy started facing a tough competition. This was the point where companies realised that the 4Ps were no longer sufficient to attract the consumer. There had to be some point of differentiation for the brand to rise above the others. A SOLUTION: REDUCE CALL RATES The solution that Indian telcos came up with was reduction in call rates. Call rates were reduced to 50p/min from 1re/min (local) and 1.50rs/min from 3.24rs/min (STD). The first Indian Telco to come up with this strategy was Airtel and as expected, it became a huge success. Customers were attracted towards the slashed call rate schemes and people started switching networks. But as we mentioned, there was a rat race in the market. As soon as the scheme became a hit, all other providers also came up with the same strategy. The next call reduction scheme was launched by Tata Docomo, the GSM brand of Tata telecom services in India, wherein the customer was charged 1p/sec. The scheme, popularly known as pay per second, freed customer from paying for the entire minute even if the call duration was less than a minute. A hike in the customer base was observed but the scheme was adopted by all the service providers in no time. With the launch of pay per second scheme, a decline in ARPU was observed for all service providers but still the scheme was adopted by the providers because of the market competition. CALL RATE REDUCTION: A FAILURE TO INCREASE MARKET SHARE This was the point where the market players realised that offerings with respect to call rates only was not doing any good. It could not be taken as a point of differentiation by the customer and so could not attract a huge customer base. The service providers were thus forced to think of some new market strategy to differentiate their brand from the others in the market.

PROBLEM FACED BY INDIAN TELCOS y Telecom operators may try very hard to earn extraordinary Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) from high-value customers, to drive ARPU from low-value customers, and to drive up Value Added Services (VAS) revenue. Despite the fact that they have spent tremendous resources to implement their winning strategies, ARPU is still decreasing. Telecom operators may have the most innovative loyalty and retention programs, highly competitive prices, structures and plans, and deliver best-inclass services to their customers. Although they get pretty high satisfaction scores, churn rate is still increasing. Telecom operators may have the largest market share in their own region, but that makes them particularly vulnerable to low-cost operators. Both customers and employees feel no differences between their brands and their competitors' brands. Their brands are big but empty.

SOLUTION: CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE What is customer experience? Customer experience (CX)is an interaction between an organization and a Customer. It is a blend of an organizations physical performance, the senses stimulated and emotions evoked, each intuitively measured against customer expectations across all moments of contact. It is the sum of all experiences a customer has with a supplier of goods or services, over the duration of their relationship with that supplier.

RELEVANCE OF CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE Most telecom operators, faced with saturated markets, are placing severe pressure on Marketing to deliver improved results. They are also focusing on better ways to effectively implement and efficiently manage their marketing strategy. Marketing is positioning products and services to more narrowly-focused customer segments in an effort to deliver relevant offers and messages to produce the desired results. They are trying to get cross-selling off the ground to find new areas of product differentiation. But the customers are resisting. Every day they are flooded with sales messages from a huge range of companies via every media channel for an endless array of products. The operator campaigns are simply adding to the noise. Personalised dialogues for individual customer are not happening. Consequently, they are reacting to the telecoms marketing campaigns with an apathy that often turns into antipathy. So, despite a sustained effort, the growth of ARPU is sluggish and churn remains stubbornly high. What can be done about it? The answer lies in implementing Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM) to improve the customer experience Research has shown that improving the customer experience, i.e. how a customer feels about the way they are approached by a company, has a significant, positive impact on revenues and long-term customer value.

CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE MANAGEMANT The goal of customer experience management (CEM) is to move customers from satisfied to loyal and then from loyal to advocate. CEM is a strategy that focuses the operations and processes of a business around the needs of the individual customer. Companies are focusing on the importance of the experience.

Various experiences provided by the telecom service providers as a differentiating factor for themselves are listed below: AIRTEL: y Hello tune service, wherein the calling customer can hear a song rather than the usual ring, is being offered by almost all the existing players. But airtel got an upper edge here by introducing Gifting Hello Tunes scheme for the customer. Other than gifting chocolates, flowers and greetings the loved ones, one could now gift a hello tune, as per the occasion. It also offered customizable caller tunes,one can have up to three customized tunes for his/her special callers. Airtel recently announced Win a Chevrolet Spark contest for their prepaid and postpaid mobile phone customers in Himachal Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, and J&K. Customers can win Chevrolet Spark by just downloading the highest possible number of hello tunes. . Participants will get need to pay Rs. 15 per hello tune and the monthly charges for it are Rs. 30. With the growing popularity of social networking site, facebook, it has allowed its users to have free access to facebook via www.0.facebook.com. Airtel took a big step towards customer satisfaction by stopping bulks SMS services. This was great news for customers of the telecom giants as more and more mobile users around India were troubled through such services. Being the first in the industry to do so has definitely given Airtel an edge over other services providers in the industry. In order to one up the customer satisfaction, Airtel has tied up with UK based ip.access to bring picocell technology to India. Picocells solve the network problem in areas like offices and buildings. Number of dropped calls due to insufficient network coverage reduces drastically with this technology.

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VODAFONE: y Offered the customers free hello tune which was basically a Vodafone advertisement. So with this, the customers were delighted to have a caller tune without any monthly rental and Vodafone got its own brand promoted. With the launch of 3G service, it provided a free trial of the service to the customers at the existing 2G prices from 3rd November 2010 to 11th April 2011. Free trial was provided with the aim of letting customers know the benefits of 3G. Introduced special night calling packs for those who require more calling during the night.

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Introduced advertisements with animated figures, named Zoo Zoos which appealed to the customers a lot. Launched exclusive Vodafone Tuesday offer which offered to the customers buy one get one scheme on movie tickets and eatables at outlets like Dominos, Pizza Hut, Costa Coffee, Giani, Bercos, etc. Introduced chota recharge for customers who do not want to recharge their numbers with a large amount in one go.

MTNL: y y y Was the first brand to launch 3G services in India. Calls made between Delhi and Mumbai were charged as per the local call tariffs Slashed ISD calling rates to six countries, including US, Canada and China, for its GSM and 3G subscribers to Re 1 a minute, which is lowest among all the brands in the telecom sector. SPECIAL NUMBER FOR STUDENT

RELIANCE: y Came up with the R-World(Reliance World). It included various services like Missed call alerts, love match, Wallpapers and Ringtone downloads, Beauty Tips, Mobile apps, etc. Introduced Rs.299 and Rs.599 special packs for users with heavy usage. With Rs.299 pack, reliance users can call reliance users in the same state absolutely free of cost. With Rs.599 plan, reliance users can call other reliance users all over the country free of cost.

IDEA: y Idea cellular ltd launched new prepaid card, MY GANG, targeting the youth of the nation. It was a power packed product having unique services like the closed users group (CUG) on prepaid and the youth mobile radio. My Gang' offers local group calls within 'My Gang' subscriber groups at the rate of 10 paisa per minute and group SMS at the rate of one paisa. Idea introduced 3G trial pack for Rs 7 in Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand. The 3G trial pack comes with a validity of one day and offers 20 MB of data usage. Apart from that, it is also offering video calling on 3G for its customers at just 2p/sec, for all local and national calls. Idea Cellular has extended its recent television commercial, which shows a politician asking for public opinion before finalising a development project, to real life. A website, myidea.co.in, has been created, which allows users to raise or

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submit questions related to issues in their cities or districts, politics, society, economy, entertainment and sports. AIRCEL: y Came up with the Pocket Apps feature. One can easily access the store on his/her mobile through GPRS, WAP and SMS and pick an app from seven different categories Everyday Convenience, Education & Career, Finance, Health & Living, Games, Music & Fun and Socially Connected.

VIRGIN MOBILE: y Came up with an exclusive idea of paying the customers for every call they receive. Customers were paid 10p/min for every call they received.