Corporate Customers need a REAL Management Portal

The Challenge of the Self Service Platform

Serving millions of subscribers without a Self-Care Portal is not an option for Telcom Service Providers anymore. Customers love the freedom of changing devices, adding services, or upgrading bundles – when they want to and wherever they want to.  Since customers expect QUICK customer service- any time waiting on the phone is not acceptable – self-service applications are the quickest – no need to wait at all!

Self-care is no longer a “nice to have.” Self-care is a necessity to providing service and excellent customer experience. In fact, it has become so important that 70% of customers now expect a company’s website to include a self-service application.

The Corporate customer support must be a Corporate Self-Management tool with a CRM that includes the corporate subscribers

Self-care is becoming the first service choice for customers. The days when a phone call was the only option to reach support, are long gone. In fact, 40% of consumers now prefer self-service over human contact. A study conducted by Dimension Data found that 73% of customers prefer to use a company’s website, instead of using social media, SMS and live chat for support.

Service Providers have also found that offering self-care solutions is a smart way to save costs of call centres. Customers don’t need to call just to find out what their status is or what should they expect to be charged. A simple click takes them to their data and account status.After establishing that self-care should be part of any service provider go-to-market strategy, it is vital to make sure that this portal is functional enough, secured and future proofed for adding services and customers.

Private Self-care ≠ Corporate Self-care

A private customer mostly manages services and bills of one device, sometimes a few devices. However, corporate customers need much more! They have hundreds and thousands of devices. The authorized corporate representative expects to be able to manage the permissions for these devices in groups and individually. Each device used by an employee may have various services. Also, how is the cost split between the employee and the company?

It is not practical to offer the same self-care support for individuals and to corporate customers

A self-service portal built to service individuals with 1 or 2 devices, will not have the answer to a corporate customer representative that needs management reports, bulk activations, and the ability to group device services and costs by teams and allocations. The corporate customer representative must manage the expenses, the activation, the plans, bundles, tariffs, spending limits, policies, content filtering, etc.  When the user of the self-service platform is the corporate customer representative, they expect a management tool. They are supposed to set up the policies based on the promises to the employees.

Private Customer Self-care

• Easy to use on any screen size
• Continuous scrolling design with clear navigation
• All relevant information in real-time
• Clear confirmations and alerts
• Ability to add or remove services
• Ability to view and manage bundle usage
• Ability to see history of usage and invoices

Corporate customer self-care

The Corporate customer support must be a Corporate Self-Management tool with a CRM that includes the corporate subscribers

• Web interface – accessible via mobile device and desktop
• Ability to set up user teams / levels / reports based on the corporate organization structure (Management / Sales / Others)
• Bulk operations
• All relevant information in real-time
• Feedback screens that show that the transaction completed successfully
• Ability to add or remove services
• Ability to view and manage bundle usage
• Ability to see history of usage and invoices

Future Proofing Self-Care Support

Preparing the Corporate self-care and dashboards for the future

To make sure these self-service interfaces will still be relevant in the future, we need to use the latest infrastructure and technologies available for software development. The foundations must be strong and supportive of all the browsers (mobile and desktop) with Full REST APIs build on the latest version of Angular.

Securing Self-Care Support

When allowing individual customers or corporate customer representatives, to provision and manage services or change their billing packages, we must secure this connection and make sure that only the authorized person makes the changes and is that the portal cannot be hacked. We also want to protect the network from being hacked via the self-service portal. Having security in mind requires the most up to date cybersecurity protection methods.  We chose SPRING security. Spring Security is a powerful and highly customizable authentication and access–control framework. It is the de-facto standard for securing applications. Spring Security provides both authentication and authorization to Java applications. The real power of Spring Security is in the way it can be extended to meet custom requirements.

Security

Comprehensive and extensible support for both Authentication and Authorization, Protection against attacks such as session fixation, clickjacking, cross-site request forgery, etc. Servlet API integration. Optional integration with Spring Web MVC

Final words

When creating self-care support for your customers, take into account that corporate customers need a REAL tool to manage their employees using your services.  They need dashboards, reports, bulk activations, and much more. They want to be independent of customer care centres no less than the private customers. You must not sell them short with an app that will not allow them to manage their subscribers.