One thing that must be said about global telecom executives is that they aren't overly self-satisfied.

At least that's what a global survey, done by The Economist Intelligence Unit for Oracle, would seem to indicate. In that survey, communications industry executives said in overwhelming numbers that they have a strategy in place to make their businesses more customer-centric. But only 15% of those executives rank their programs as successful.

What that indicates, according to Sanjay Mehta, senior director of product marketing for Oracle, is that companies need to be doing more than their traditional Customer Relationship Management programs to collect and maintain accurate data on customer needs.

"As the market has become more democratized, we need to get better at targeting services to the customer," Mehta said. "One-third of the executives in the survey believes they don't have accurate customer data."

There is also greater challenge today as customer needs evolve more quickly and communications companies realize that customers interact with their service providers over a range of end points, not simply through a CRM system.

"We are at an unprecedented point in the industry," he said. "It's not a question of inventing any more — it's a question of rollout. We have the devices."

Of course, a company like Oracle benefits when service providers invest more in customer care and data mining and the like, but even setting those self-serving motives aside, Mehta has an undeniable point.

One of Oracle's big pushes is to integrate billing and other customer information and put all this data at the customer service rep's fingertips so that when a customer contacts the service provider — for any reason — the most can be made of that time.

When we think about customer service today, we most often think about bad customer service — endless hold times, the mindless trek through interactive voice response systems — but Oracle is saying service providers have the opportunity and the technology to do things much better.

Email me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.