It is an intensely competitive and commoditised environment that is evolving at a rapid pace. The most successful operators will be those that have highly flexible business models designed to capitalise upon this fluid marketplace. For them, the new environment offers transformational/market share and ARPU growth opportunities.

The winning operators will put customers at the absolute heart of their strategy. In this cut throat era, in depth understanding of customer needs and then serving those needs will be crucial to win and retain customers, and then cross sell and up sell to them.

In the first instance, operators must offer consumers compelling yet easy to understand products and packages, with attractive prices - with the huge variety of potential package and pricing options, it could be easy to confuse and alienate customers.

Strong brand equity will be vital for operators to differentiate themselves. This will require ongoing investment in brand building to capture consumer engagement and develop brand loyalty.

However, the value of strategic product and brand development will not be fully realised unless customers receive a first class experience. A focus on providing superlative customer service, whenever and however customers contact them, must be central to operators' strategic thinking.

Self-service, IVR and virtual response mechanisms will play an important role in delivering customer value. But live telephone calls between customers and customer agents will be more important than ever before. The complexity of operators' offerings will lead to an increased level of customer questions about a broader range of issues. This will demand detailed responses that only person-to-person communication can deliver.

Billing will be a particular issue. Already, many customer calls to contact centres are payment queries. As operators provide more services, bills will become more complex, causing a rising level of customer enquiries. The purchase of more services by customers is also likely to lead to an increase in the late payment of bills. To maximise cash flow, operators will need to ensure they have customer agents that are trained and experienced in collecting monies due from customers.

The demand for more customer service will also be driven by the increasing complexity of the technology in hardware, such as mobile phones, routers, and set-top boxes and by the proliferation of hardware types. Operators will need to provide effective customer services, for instance, to support the rising use of data services such as web browsing and email.

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