As a result of competitive consolidation and historical siloed purchasing approaches, many service providers are challenged with a multitude of different networks and OSS/BSS platforms. These heterogeneous environments complicate the challenge of delivering excellent customer experiences and as a result many of today’s CRM projects fall short or fail both the enterprise and the customer’s expectations.

In addition, today’s competitive environment creates more customer choice, which raises expectations of customers across the board. As a result, customer segments are becoming increasingly challenging in terms of how they behave towards the service provider. The increasing variance of customer behaviour draws significantly upon service provider resources, creating a situation in which service providers have less loyal customers and higher customer service costs.

Therefore service providers will need to have industry guidelines on how to pursue customer driven strategies that intelligently link to the customer, capturing critical customer behaviour data in order to grow satisfaction and loyalty while simultaneously lowering costs.

Based on the TMF’s extensive professional membership and the proposed project’s synergy with existing TMF framework initiatives i.e. e-TOM, NGOSS, and SID, the TeleManagement Forum is well placed to provide industry standard guidelines for such a framework. It must be recognised there is very little solid based evidence testing the relationship of customer satisfaction and service provider financial performance within the service provider industry.

Within the TMF there is a strong definition of process (the eTOM) and data (the SID) but there lacked a formalised way of grouping together function and data into recognised components, which would then be regarded as potentially procurable as either applications or services

This project will produce an Telecom Applications Map to provide this grouping - describing and naming a set of applications, together with the data they act upon/use and the function/process they perform and an element of decomposition/grouping. These applications are synonymous with services.

Participating Companies: Amdocs, Vodafone, Tata Consultancy Services Limited, Softlab, BearingPoint, and TektronixAT&T, BT, Colt Telecommunications, EDS, Metasolv, Oracle, QinetiQ, Sprint-Nextel, SunTec, TDC, TeliaSonera, and Tribold