FEATURE CUSTOMER RELATIONS
Rawling, senior marketing director at Oracle, carriers really do understand the challenge. It’s the way you bring it all together. “Systems and technologies need to talk to each other,” he says. “The customer experience is where differentiation is going to be. It’s not a network initiative, or about billing or a call centre, it’s about organisational change. It’s about all these things,” says Rawling. “It’s a business problem.” Often, this necessitates the appointment of a head of customer service or, in the case of Everything Everywhere, a chief customer officer (CCO). The CCO’s role is to ensure that the cus- tomer service team continuously reviews its processes and its engagement with custom- ers to identify opportunities for improve- ment, while the team’s goal is to improve customer loyalty and recommendation rates. One method Everything Everywhere uses is to set up specific teams to deal with issues in anticipation of significant events, such as when there is a new product entering the market that is likely to be immensely popular. “We have an experienced team in place to support all enquiries and we have dedicated teams for certain enquiries. For example, when we launched the iPhone we had a dedicated team to support on this and this alone,” a spokesman tells MCI. Such an executive will need to be able to marshal data feeds from all other parts of the operator’s business, says Convergys’ VP for communications, Igor Sarenac. “Every functional group in an operator has their own set of data reports,” he says. “You have a set or marketing data, a set of data that comes from customer surveys, a set that comes from listen- ing into the call centre. If you don’t connect all of these up to each other, that’s a big mistake.” Accountability is a development also picked
up on by Iain Regan from Firstsource, who says that chief- and senior executives are now being given remits extending across all parts of the telco operation, including ownership of, and accountability for, ensuring that the customer ex- perience is consistent across the entire operation. Lee Epting, content services director at
Vodafone, is a case in point. While each Voda- fone operation has a dedicated team, which in the company’s parlance caters to CVM (customer value management ), Epting takes aspects of the customer experience under her own umbrella. “When I was focused on the discovery of content, the customer experi- ence wasn’t really in my remit,” she says. “But now there’s this focus on the transparency
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Chief and senior executives are now being given remits including ownership of, and accountability for, ensuring that the customer experience is consistent
of information and, in order to create great discovery features on the device, we realised we can integrate customer care too. It was an ‘aha’ moment.” Epting believes that customer experience is an area of differentiation for providers and returns to this idea about transparency of information—a two-way flow of data between the operator and the consumer—as a means of preventing churn. “Are we listening to our customers and understanding their needs, wants and desires as they relate to support and access to information?” she asks. “How do I, as a provider, put data about your phone usage into something you can understand, and help you change your behaviour?” As head of content, Epting is involved
in many of these touchpoint opportunities between Vodafone and the end user and she believes that, in a digital world, the ability to serve customers from a digital perspective is absolutely key. “So we’ve focused on giving our customers access to information that is valu- able to them and related to their relationship with Vodafone. Telcos have sometimes been accused of being a bit grey with regards to the transparency in their offerings and usage, and making that information available really is key.” According to Oliver Finn, VP marketing at
active subscriber intelligence provider The Now Factory, this is one area that allows the operator to position itself as gatekeeper of the smartphone ecosystem. Finn says that operators should promote the apps that are most suitable for the network and cause the fewest issues to the operator, as these will also be the ones that cause fewest issues to the consumer. In addition they should also empower the consumer and promote self-care. A positive experience can be created, without requiring costly support intervention. “This means giving customers more information about the devices and apps that they’re using, and directing them to self-care portals so that they can easily configure their devices,” he says. The consumption of content and interac-
tion with self-care services are increasingly driven by social media, and it is crucial to recognise how this one factor is dramatically changing the customer service landscape. There is an inherent danger in social media as, when customers take to social network- ing sites to communicate with brands, it is often to vent their frustrations at an instance of poor customer service, and share their negative experiences with their friends and acquaintances. “It is critical that operators step up their notion of customer service and realise that— for those that don’t – their customers can not only defect to someone else, they can also infect a far wider community. Their sphere of influence goes well beyond their friends down the block; now that sphere of influ- ence literally encompasses the globe,”says Syniverse’s Jeff Gordon. One way Everything Everywhere has tackled
this challenge is by putting into place a buzz monitoring system that tracks and evaluates social comment and sentiment. The company says that the solution gives it access to real time information which it uses in four main ways: to engage in online conversation where appropri- ate; to manage its own social media campaigns; to evaluate online sentiment and its campaign performance; and to educate the business with real-time info on products and services. The operator also uses dedicated corre- spondents to track customer sentiment and communicate with customers experiencing poor service. The spokesperson explains: “One example of how we use social media as a tool to provide customer service is the @ OrangeHelpers Twitter stream which helps customers with questions about everything from handsets to contracts, apps to bills and tariffs to texts.” A grasp of social media is just one strength
that operators will need to develop if they are to truly place the customer experience at the heart of their business for the duration of each customer’s life cycle. They will need to back this up by exploiting the full range of data at their disposal from the different functional units within their business. Appointing a chief customer officer, or equivalent, is a positive move and one that many operators will likely make. But in reality this is just another way of slicing the cake of business responsibilities. If that senior executive does not have the power to effect change within the organisation, then the operator will not be able to effect change in the customer experience. n
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