Service providers need to address head-on the OTT threat by adopting the 3R’s of business success: of Re-engagement, Recirculation and Retention – a topic I explored in a recent blog post.
If not, they’ll be sure to end up redundant a lot quicker than they most likely anticipated.
Simply delivering customers up to the OTT operators, if service providers aren’t willing to seek a way to stand out from the crowd, they might as well accept their role as a dumb pipe and give up the fight now. To bring their hard won customers’ eyeballs back home, having a purposeful and compelling offering is the name of the game.
This could be referred to as the 4th ‘R’ for customer success; Relevancy.
If a customer doesn’t see your service as the relevant factor in getting the experience they want, you’re on to a losing streak. The tough truth is that your family, neighbours and friends simply do not care who supplies the infrastructure behind their Internet and telephone services. Potentially they’ve just made a move to a new place, do they simply stick with whichever provider they ended up inheriting with the property or base their decision on price? Opting for the cheapest provider available only caring about the content and OTT services it enables them to access. Apparent preferences often only run skin-deep until a better deal comes along. What’s increasingly obvious is that what they really care about are the value-add services they have access to.
Service providers need to take a step back and ask themselves ‘what am I bringing to the table that my customers can’t get elsewhere?’ Underlying loyalty is often the element of trust in a brand, and it’s this factor which is vital. Stay relevant to the customer and encourage them to use your services by being that trusted advisor for them.
Work with partners and vendors able to offer them the functionality which brings OTT eyeballs back to you. Bundling services to create something truly compelling, with a very high value-add, is critical. For example, if you’re losing droves of customers daily to Gmail, work with a platform able to seamlessly bring widgets into your environment and enable the full functionality consumers really desire and more. And then for the value-add, why not tap into something customers really care about – who has access to their data. What about also offering services based on maximum assurance around privacy or security?
Simply put, the driving factor for today’s consumer is a compelling offering. Taking OTT operators on at their own game is something all service providers will need to do sooner rather than later. They’ll find out quickly that in this fight, relevancy isn’t just the key to survival; it’s the crucial factor in enabling them to thrive.
