Over the years, multisystem operators' expectations for their customer care, billing, ordering and provisioning systems have been simple: they should "just work."

But then satellite service providers and telcos introduced new, real competition. As a result, there was some IT work needed to support competitive tools including VOD, PPV, broadband and phone services. Generally, as long as the business models were relatively stable and customers were the same customers, so was the IT infrastructure and the expectation of it: just make sure it works.

These days, however, things are changing drastically.

• New players in the market introduced technologies that change the definition of a customer. A cable customer is no longer a household; it is a person. In fact, individuals may be both commercial and residential consumers within the same household.
• Entry barriers are disappearing. A flood of new players has entered the game, from OTT players to game console makers, disrupting traditional revenue and earning structures.
• While traditional competition was about "who has a better network," new competition is all about customer experience. Competitors don't even have a network.

Thus, multisystem operators (MSOs) must make sure the network outperforms traditional competition and adapt the video experience to outperform the new competition. But they also need to adapt to capitalize on their ongoing relationship with their customers in ways only they can. Here's the solution to fend off growing competition:

• The customer care experience should delight the customers to the point they love their provider. It should be intuitive, personal and proactive. It should be easy.
• Services should be unbundled within the household to the level people can order pre- or post-paid services that are targeted at individuals, not families or businesses.
• New services that capitalize on MSO assets that differentiate these traditional providers from the newcomers should be introduced in a growing pace to offset the revenue decline from traditional services

Faced right, these challenges pose huge opportunities for the industry. Done right, customer management systems will allow targeting specific packages to different people in the family, defining spending buckets for each of the children in the family, grandparents to pay for their grandchildren's VOD usage and other innovative offerings.

They will allow MSOs to proactively act on consumers' service issues before end users even know they have an issue. In short, MSOs will turn consumer management into a core asset rather than a billing relationship.

These capabilities will require MSOs to fundamentally enhance their existing customer care, billing, ordering and provisioning systems. Point solutions will not help anymore and the 20- to 30-year-old systems currently in place should be supplanted by modern systems which are flexible and agile, and especially, personal.

These competitive pressures also reinforce the growing need for engineering and IT departments to break out of their silos and collaborate (a trend which has been accelerating lately due to network virtualization).

On one hand, BSS systems need the network data to better understand the customer's viewing habits and service challenges in order to create and analyze the customer's profile and motivations. Then, that robust profile built by BSS needs to be seamlessly available at every touch point — from alerting field technicians to the customer's state of mind, all the way to tailoring programs and ads specifically to the individual viewer.

More and more CIOs understand the need to adapt and are fighting an uphill battle to demonstrate that, unlike in the past, IT cannot just "expect to work." It needs to be a collaborator in the solution.