FEATURE CEM – RETAIL


Soft Cell


The retail store is back in vogue as operators look to inject the customer experience into the first and most influential touch-point in the customer relationship lifecycle.


By Mike Hibberd


ot too long ago, “customer acquisi- tion” was something of a dirty term in the cellular industry. Operators were queasy with the hangover from their land grabbing activities and the focus turned to customer retention as they sought to identify the highest value customers and keep them in the fold. The industry operates on cycles, though, and acquisition has now come back to the fore—driven, as much within the industry is today, by the arrival of the smartphone era. That era, of course, was ushered in by the iPhone and—yet again—Apple’s influence can be detected in some of the key shifts that we are witnessing. While retail is once again a key priority for


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operators, the focus is less on shifting boxes and signing up cud-munching consumers than on using this first point of contact as a launch pad for the somewhat ephemeral Customer Experience. The ideal is that eve- rything the operator’s brand stands for can somehow be distilled into a retail experience that leaves each customer feeling so happy with the product they’ve bought that they never want to churn. Nowhere else in the mobile operator’s business is the ideal more divorced from the reality. Network technology, broadly speaking,


works. And when something goes wrong with it, the problem can be identified and fixed. This


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is because technology obeys laws of physics. People are an altogether more unpredictable element of the operator’s world—employ- ees as well as customers—and this is what makes customer experience management in general, and retail in particular, such tricky games to play. Nonetheless, the retail phase of the cus- tomer lifecycle is benefiting from a great deal of analysis and investment as operators try to refine their acquisition activities. Greater sophistication in the retail process is neces- sary because of greater sophistication in the devices and services being retailed—and the blend of channels being used by operators to initiate contracts is a delicate balancing act. In addressing the retail experience they


offer as smartphones become more pervasive, operators need to look at potential retail out- comes. According to Tim Deluca-Smith , VP for marketing at customer experience specialist WDS, there are four potential destinations in retail, and only one of them is good. The first sees the customer taking owner- ship of the device and finding, after some initial experimentation, that they are defeated by the complexity of the handset and/or the associated services. The user then reverts to basic service use, such as voice and text. In the second scenario the initial experience is the same but the user is more motivated to overcome their difficulties. In being so,


however, they become a support burden to the operator. A third customer might simply return the phone—resulting in wasted time or even churn—while in the fourth, ideal scenario, the customer is well matched to the product and services they have bought, and is well set up to become a profitable user. “Getting things right in that first retail period will really shape the profitability of the customer,” Deluca-Smith says. “When we do root cause analyses as part of a support contract, it’s amazing how many of the issues can be traced back to a deficiency in the retail phase. Products are too often incorrectly matched or mis-sold.” The importance of properly aligning custom- ers with products is driving some operators to promote their physical stores in the retail channel mix. Online and call centre sales may well be more convenient and cost effective, but person-to-person interaction is now seen as ex- tremely important by operators looking to inject the customer experience into the retail process. The influence of Apple’s retail stores cannot


be overestimated here. Vodafone’s director of content services, Lee Epting, says that, “in terms of retail customer experience, Apple set the bar with its Genius Bar.” This facet of Apple’s retail environment, where a number of in-store agents are trained to an expert degree in the firm’s products and solutions, enabling them to answer any customer query »


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