How to Differentiate Your Business through Customer Experience Management – Key Takeaways from MVNOs North America Congress

At the recent MVNO North America Congress in Dallas, Customer Experience Management (CEM) was a hot topic that was discussed in the panel discussions. Shaibal Datta, President & Managing Partner at Sigma Software pointed out that a majority of service providers agree that CEM is one of the key success factors given the commoditized product/service portfolios in the telecom industry. However, service providers and MVNOs face challenges on how to improve customer experience.

Creating a Customer Focused Company Culture

Tyler Leshney, President of Ultra Mobile said that a customer-focused culture can’t be created without building a solid foundation. The foundation lies in two main areas:

1.       Definition – Clearly defining who are your customer
2.       Mission – What is your central mission

 Everything you do to improve customer experience should build on this foundation.

Proactive Customer Approach

Ken Schaffer, EVP Products at Ting shared their best practices on utilizing a proactive customer approach that Ting has empowered its support staff to do anything and everything necessary to solve customer complaints quickly. Ting’s customer care team collects customer feedback based on the Net Promoter Score (NPS) and shares all such constructive complaints with its product team for immediate and continuous improvement.

Embracing Social Media

One of the challenges is on how to embrace social media to provide a timely response to customers’ queries/issues. Diane Magers, Customer Experience Executive at AT&T explained how social media has been managed within AT&T in that its customer service team owns the social media channels, while Marketing also uses these channels to help in its decision-making process. It is significant not only to listen and respond to customers, but also to understand how customers conduct business through the social media channels.

With the high fragmentation and diversity of social messages, to find a balance in managing social media is challenging. Tyler emphasized that addressing the root cause of a complaint is much more critical than responding to every single question a customer ask. If you can solve the root cause of a problem, it may save you a lot of time in answering 50 similar complaints.

Technology

Ensuring a pleasant customer experience highly depends on to what degree internal employees, especially customer care team, have been taken care of. Many service providers and MVNOs have equipped employees with modern technology to facilitate the communication process, both internal and external. Here is a list of tools that are widely used to increase the productivity:

•  Slack – real-time messaging and archiving and search for internal teams.
• Yammer – an enterprise social network to get work done faster.
• Delighted – gather customer feedback with Net Promoter Score in minutes.
•  Zendesk – a web-based customer support and ticketing software.
• Salesforce – cloud-based customer relationship management software for distributed sales teams.
• Observe Big Data Analytics platform – to collect and store real-time structured and unstructured data for timely decision making.

 Simplicity

The effective customer experience management requires simplicity. To design the business process and products as simple as possible allows customer care team to readily explain each product/service to customers.  Troy Trybom, CIO North America at ACN gave an example from Amazon regarding its intuitive digital experience. However, Troy emphasized that simplicity is often not inexpensive or quick. Service providers and MVNOs should plan carefully and comprehensively taking into account many manual processes in the back office and the challenges of a tight budget.

The treadmill phenomenon - How to stay ahead of the game with the ever-changing customer base

We can always find co-workers at our workplace who seem very busy, speaking fast, walking fast, no time to chit-chat or even take time to eat lunch. Does “busy” mean productivity? Often times the answer is no. This made me think about the “treadmill phenomenon”:

• You work very hard. But no matter how fast you walk/run, you do not go anywhere.
• If you stop, you will find that you are actually in the exact same spot where you started from.

To be fair, with budget constraints the way they are in many companies, employees carry relatively more responsibilities compared to their workload in the past. However, to some extent, busy means laziness. Busy can be a good excuse not to think about why we do what we do. Just do it to get it done.

I have noticed that Simon Sinek’s “start with why” philosophy - The golden circle has been mentioned in various meetings and conferences recently. The golden circle has three layers:

1. “Why”- why we need to do it? Why can’t we do it?

2. “How” - How we can achieve the goal. It’s the route towards the direction.

3. “What” - What is the expected result?

The golden circle concept is a philosophy of thinking from the inside out. The core belief is Why. If you have a business or you are on the way to transform your business in line with the emerging technologies and ever-changing customer base, to find out “why” - the real value of your business is mission critical. As Sinek puts it, “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.”

Successful companies are those who can clearly answer the “why” question. For example, Mark Zuckenburg founded Facebook because he identified “why he wanted to do it” that to connect people in the world is very important. Everybody wants to connect with his/her friends and family members. Life becomes more meaningful if we can connect with people and share what happens in our life with them.

As a marketer, to find out why customers need/what to buy from us out of all other competitors and to communicate the value to the customers is significant. When Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook, instead of describing what they do - sell computers.  He said that we sell dreams. We help customers unleash their inner genius, and we will win over their hearts and minds. The “why” has generated hundreds of millions of Apple fans.

To start from why, often times, needs to challenge the status quo, challenge ourselves and overcome all our own negative feelings and make changes albeit obstacles and criticisms at different levels. However, this may be the only way we can avoid the treadmill phenomenon and keep abreast of changes and stay ahead of the game.