Business Accent

The present and future of telecommunication operators’ customer experience

Kamlesh Bhatia discusses how telcos can improve their interaction with the customer and thereby the customer experience

As mobile operators in India get ready to usher in a new mobile revolution based on high-speed networks such as 3G and WiMAX, they should also be prepared to deliver a superior customer experience to their subscribers. This will improve not just customer loyalty and contain churn but also encourage uptake of new services that make the business case for investing in these advanced networks.

Enhancing levels of customer experience is easier said than done considering it takes more than just willingness on part of the telecom operators. Operators need to make strategic investments in business processes, technology and staff to set the right expectations of the quality and nature of the experience, deliver the intended experience and capture feedback of its execution.

Gartner recently conducted a global survey to evaluate operator attitudes and activities in the area of customer experience. The study explored how operators in different markets perceived customer experience.

Operators with the highest level of sophistication in their attitude to customer experience tended to be operators challenging the incumbent providers in highly competitive, mature markets. These operators need to retain the customers that they have acquired and differentiate themselves on customer experience in order to reduce churn. This was a significant part of their strategy.

The expression of what customer experience meant to these operators was quite uniformly around ‘delivery of the brand at every touch point’. This meant that that certain stated brand values—typically those around simplicity, transparency and friendliness—could be seen by a customer every time they come into contact with the company’s products, services or employees.

Companies with operations in a variety of geographies, often in varying states of maturity had a mixed level of sophistication in their customer experience programs. Such operators had group functions, which were responsible for top-level decisions about what the company defines as a ‘good experience’ and the dissemination of best practice among the various operating companies. Similarly, there were some companies that we categorized as less sophisticated in their approach to customer experience. Most of these operators, especially in emerging markets realized that customer experience was important, but was not their main strategic focus, or something that guided all of the activities and thinking of the company.

All of the companies or operating divisions, with more sophisticated customer experience strategies, had some sort of customer experience team and undertook various activities across the organization under the banner of ‘customer experience initiatives’. This team can, variously, sit in marketing, strategy or report directly into the board—although reporting into the Chief Marketing Officer seems to be the most frequent reporting structure among the surveyed companies.

The typical size of the customer experience team seemed to be around 6 to 12 people and a mixture of left-brained, analytical people and right-brained, change management staff. The team was usually divided between various types of different activities designed to capture the imagination of company employees and improve their understanding of how the customer feels about their experiences. As well as more formal research for use in strategy setting, a number of activities were seen to promote understanding of the customer across the company. Some of these were:

Face-to-face activities

Arranged activities such as those based on the model of speed dating—where employees and customers meet face-to-face for short amounts of time and employees can ask questions to explore customer attitudes and requirements. This ensures that non-customer facing staff had a good understanding of the customer.

Creation of a customer persona

Several companies had created customer personas to help the employees to envisage a typical customer. For example, Orange UK has a persona called ‘Dave’. These personas were used in internal communications, activities to understand the customer and sometimes to help during large process-fixing programs.

Use of Social Media

There was some discussion of activities using blogging and other social media to listen to what the customer is saying and interact with them on a more informal basis.

Senior Management Interactions

Senior management interaction with customers, by doing things like working in a store for a day or calling customers who have complained; help the voice of the customer to be heard at the higher levels of the organization.

Hot Phones

The use of a ‘hot phone’ was seen in Vodafone (UK) and variants on this idea were seen elsewhere; for example, e-mail initiatives. The telephone number was given out to employees and allowed them to give ideas or suggest how things could be improved. It was also available for them to give to customers so that they could contribute too.

Some or all of the initiatives mentioned above were then used to create a company strategy for customer experience. This then resulted into a ‘customer blueprint’, which mapped out good quality processes to underpin the various customer journeys—helping to create standards and a consistently good experience.

In most cases, the typical program for strategy creation included:

• Internal workshops, external market research and analysis of customer data.
• Identification of a list of customer touch points and identification of the main customer journeys, which might be taken at each of the touch points. For example, the journey taken on the phone with customer services when a customer loses a mobile phone.
• An examination of the “moments of truth” at each touch point. “Moments of truth” are key events that happen at a touch point where a good experience would strongly influence a customer’s perception of a company. An example of this is facilitating the prompt delivery of a new phone for a high-usage customer that has lost their old one.

Developing customer experience strategy to meet the future

There are likely to be opposing forces that the customer experience team will need to react to in the future. On the one hand, the increasing familiarity of the company with the necessity of providing a good customer experience and, on the other, the need, during these recessionary times, to retain customers without spending lots of money on new services or dropping prices.

However, the proliferation of new services provides an increasing number of new ways for the customer to have a poor experience. It also pushes managers back toward more anti-customer experience through patterns around out-innovating the competition.

If the operator is really serious about customer experience being in the DNA of the company and willing to commit to a long-term plan for its improvement; then senior staff needed to be able to articulate what type of experience they would like the company to be ‘famous’ for and how this will differentiate it from the competition.

This experience might be inexpensive, no-frills like the low-priced airline industry. Alternatively, it might be about excellence of product design, consistency and dependability of service in a consumer electronics product or warmth and friendliness of service in a luxury hotel.

With growth in competition and price no longer a sustainable competitive advantage, we believe customer experience will be one of the key differentiators in the battle for market share in a converged services world. Given the high growth, high churn scenario in India as in other emerging markets, operators will have to build their reputation for good customer experience around attributes such as Simplicity, Competence, Trustworthiness and Distinctive Personality.

The author is Principal Research Analyst, Gartner.