If you're not already following Susan McNeice you should head over to the Yankee Group site and read some of her work.  You get a sense of her irreverent, honest style by looking through some of her blog postings, but for some real insight into her work try to get your hands on one of her research reports.  I was happy to get a copy of the "Delivering a World-Class Customer Experience" paper that she recently wrote with her colleague Sheryl Kingstone.  (You might still be able to get it as a promo item from their website.) 

In it she talks about the customer experience, what it consists of, and what operators can do to make sure it's the best it can be.  Some other analyst reports might try to impress us with their bold predictions of the world just beyond the horizon, and vendor white papers too often shield their content within a thick layer of architecture diagrams and dazzling promises.  Susan's report is a straightforward reckoning of what she and her team see as what's important to improving the customer experience.

One of the ways we've been helping operators make the most of their subscriber relationships takes into account a principle that's pointed out in this report.  Subscribers aren't always looking for the cheapest price, but are actually looking for the lowest price available for the combination of services, features, devices, performance and other attributes that subscribers value at that specific time. 

A theme that runs throughout the report is that the customer experience is what the customer tells you it is.  It's not a controversial statement, but the report shows how the customer experience is often managed and measured in ways that are not necessarily relevant from the subscriber's point of view. 

Another theme of the report is that the experience needs to be:

• transparent,
• consistent, and
• dynamic. 

I'm happy to see the parallels between these key attributes and the touchstones of real-time visibility and control that we've used to describe what's necessary for building long-lasting subscriber relationships.

The report ends with a set of recommendations for service providers, the first of which is "Start now".