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Featured on InsideCRM.com; written by Chris Bucholtz

Dwayne Ruffin, senior vice president of product Management at CSG Systems, has a lot on his plate. Charged with overseeing the evolution of the company from a provider of fairly standard customer management tools for the telecommunications, cable and satellite industries, he not only must help his customers deal with new communication channels; he's also got to help them understand that customer expectations are on the rise and standing still is not an option. His customer companies are struggling to find new revenue while introducing new services; to maintain and improve customer service means introducing new strategies and technologies. That was what motivated the company's acquisition of Quaero in 2008.

Ruffin spoke to Inside CRM about the service challenges facing large enterprises, the difficulty of meeting customer expectations and the company's differentiation between personalization and a customer-centric approach.

Inside CRM: Your traditional customers have been in the cable, satellite and telecommunications businesses. Those industries often get pretty tough grades from consumers. Are the players in those areas starting to understand what a competitive advantage painless service could be?

Ruffin: I think they've gotten it for a long period time. The challenges rest in the inability to normalize behavior across disparate systems. When you look at cable operators and, definitely, in the telco space, through acquisition they acquire a lot of systems, and a lot of work is required to rationalize those systems. If you're not effective at it, you've got customer data that resides in many different places. Trying to bring that together and make it meaningful from a customer experience or a rep experience has been a challenge. If you look at cable, and look the J.D. Powers surveys, those who have a tendency to score high have some consistency in the systems that sit beneath that desktop presentation. They've got one billing system, they've normalized how they provision customers, there's an enterprise data warehouse, and there's one place to go as the source of information for customers. I really do think that their challenge has been bringing the infrastructure together from an IT perspective to serve the business, and those who have done well have scored high.

To read the article in its entirety, visit InsideCRM.com.