FEATURE CUSTOMER RELATIONS


The lives of others


The 18 or 24 months in between the key touch points of acquisition and retention is where operators have to deliver on the customer experience promises that were made at the point of sale.


By Dawinderpal Sahota I


n the not too distant past, operators were slow to react to customer sentiment as the touchstones between the provider and the


customer were few and far between—the most common interaction coming at the end of the customer’s lifecycle when it was already too late to act. Yet as technology has evolved, those touchpoints have grown more frequent, push- ing customer experience centre stage. This is reflected, etymologically speaking, in the transi- tion from ‘customer relationship management’ to ‘customer experience management’. The argument is that, to deliver an unri-


valled customer experience during the lifespan of the customer relationship (not just when selling to them, or trying to stop them churn- ing), an operator must prioritise the needs of that customer throughout the organisation—in the culture, structure, technologies and busi- ness processes the operator employs. “There was a lot of system development activ- ity ten or so years ago; operators were putting in these CRM platforms, and having one dynamic interface for selling and serving gave you a ho- listic view of the customer. But really, this was fundamentally just a customer database, it’s not customer experience management,” says Iain Regan, global head of business development, at business process outsourcing firm Firstsource. Likewise, technology has allowed the system of customer reward to evolve beyond the unso- phisticated loyalty points model pioneered by supermarkets and petrol stations. As Michal Harris, director of marketing insight and strat- egy at Amdocs, points out: “Every telco had a section related to retention and loyalty but the main focus of this was all about whether the end user had enough loyalty points. Really, you have to build a relationship with the user with a more holistic approach to win customer loyalty.” This is the critical difference between cus- tomer relationship management and customer experience management—technology is no


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longer the biggest show in town. A company- wide strategy is needed to address satisfac- tion and an outstanding customer experience should be embedded in all aspects of operator strategy, from marketing and advertising to the network and smartphone portfolios. This is not to say that automated technological solutions are not vital, though. “Operators should be giving me alerts about things that are happening that may affect me; such as planned outages or service disruptions,” says Scott Kolman, senior vice president of marketing for customer experi- ence solutions provider Speech Cycle. “They need to let me know that issues do exist and that there is a resolution—action will be taken and the issue will be resolved. Proactive care such as this will show me they acknowledge me as a customer and make me feel that my concerns and welfare are valued,” he says. For example, if a subscriber gets off a


plane in a foreign country and turns on their handset, only for the phone to fail to register, they will have a negative experience. But if the operator has a platform to automatically suggest a response to this, the customer will have a positive experience. If the operator can see in real-time that


the customer’s phone has failed to register because they were not provisioned properly for international roaming but can also see that this is a high-value customer with a good credit rating, who has historically used international roaming, a business rule can be set up to automatically turn on international roaming. The operator would also need to send the customer a notification via SMS that it has enabled roaming services, and if the customer does not want it to be enabled, they can choose to disable it. “If that all happens in real-time; if I come


off the plane, turn the phone on and it works, then clearly, there are big gains,” explains Jeff Gordon, CEO at Syniverse, a technology and services provider for telcos. “From an economic point of view, that device is being used, it’s generating revenue, instead of be- ing out of commission for a few hours or a few days, and my cost to serve, because I’ve automated that infrastructure, is peanuts. It’s less than if the customer got in touch to initiate the roaming, which will have required tier one or tier two support.” Operators that are serious about customer service also need to prioritise it in the structure of their business, and according to Gordon »


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