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Amdocs, which sells tools and products to assist with the customer experience, has recently produced a study titled “Stop Going It Alone: Using Managed Services to Enhance the Customer Experience.”

Managed services might not be the first thing you think of when looking for a way to provide a compelling customer experience,. You’re not alone: Over the past decade, Amdocs (News - Alert) officials say, service providers (and others) considered managed services primarily as a way to control and reduce costs.

But more recently, a growing number of service providers have begun to view managed services partnerships as opportunities for improvements in service quality and consistency, Amdocs officials say, “launching new operations, and executing modernization and transformation projects, as well as cost savings and efficiencies.”

In the last few years alone, such service providers as AT&T, Sprint, Bell Canada, BT, Vodafone (News - Alert), and T-Mobile have signed large managed services deals that focus heavily on business process improvement and systems transformation, according to Amdocs officials.

Why is this? With managed services, service providers can take advantage of what Amdocs officials see as “four critical enablers of customer experience that are so often hard to develop and optimize internally:”

Global Best Practices and Methodologies

Applying best practice experience and hard-won lessons from other managed services engagements; as one CIO notes, “we prefer managed services for our large systems so we can use the experience and code base that vendors have instead of trying to bring it in-house.”

Customer Experience-Focused Tools

Integrating advanced operational tools such as predictive analytics for customer support and applications to monitor the quality of customer interactions.

Business Process Automation and Optimization

Streamlining and improving processes with automated monitoring, reporting, and validation, service level agreements (SLAs), and centralized processing.

Systems Innovation

Building a roadmap to implement new B/OSS products and features to support continued subscriber growth and new offering delivery.

Basically, Amdocs officials say, “a move to managed services can offer much greater financial flexibility, including the opportunity to shift sizable expenses from CAPEX to OPEX (News - Alert).”