[MOBILE WORLD CONGRESS] The Power of 1 – The Individual Customer

Listening to the “Exploring the Mobile Cloud” keynote with CEO of Alcatel Lucent, Ben Verwaayen;  CEO of Deutsche Telekom, Rene Obermann and CEO of Cisco, John Chambers, one key theme was serving the customer better.

At Mobile World Congress, there are many big screens with big numbers; billions of mobile users, trillions of dollars generated. But what the panel emphasises is that these numbers are made up of individual people. Traditionally telecommunication companies have been archaic and slow to move. They locked people into contracts and didn’t really give you a choice in a rather authoritarian way. Why was this? Verwaayen argues that “Till recently, we had no tools to recognize individual needs. Now we have the technology to do that.”

Now armed with the data and capability to dive deep into individual customer needs, companies like Alcatel Lucent, Deutsche Telekom and Cisco are looking at new ways of profile customers and deliver what they want, when they want. Verwaayen says “The time is gone where we can be comfortable with our own domains.” He later talked about the need to be more open and instead of building products that they think they want, ask them first then build.

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