Why a long term change in culture is needed to embrace customer experience management in telecoms


 

Analysis Mason recently identified the top 5 factors driving CSP’s, with ‘Reducing churn and acquiring customers’ featuring on the list, highlighting the need for enhanced customer relationships when it comes to pricing, product packages and customer drivers. It can’t be denied that customer experience is a top priority in the telecoms space, but how easy is it to really put it at the forefront of a business?

 

 

Let’s take a look at how some of the key players are approaching customer experience management in telecoms…

 

Vodafone Europe

Elia Asensio, Head of Quality at Vodafone Europe, says there are 5 measures which Vodafone class as essential to becoming customer centric; network counters, market drive test, crowd sourcing, network NPS and probing systems. To successfully bring all of these elements together, Vodafone had to consider technology measures, service measures and experience measures. Only by bringing CEM metrics into the overarching business strategy, and changing the business culture could they actually achieve this.

 

Telecom South Africa

Telecom South Africa started their customer experience management programme in 2013. Ella Engelbrecht has highlighted the importance of driving CEM from the top, quoting their CEO;

“We cannot talk customer first, then act customer second. Putting the customer first is the most important priority in Telkom.”

The CSP has even implemented a common language and terminology across the business to unite the organisation and their customers. The business had to capture the hearts and minds of employees through a long term targeted culture change to really put the customer first.

 

Saudi Telecom

Mohammed Alqahtani describes the process of improved customer experience management in telecoms as a long term change, progressing through network centricity, service centricity and finally reaching customer centricity. By changing their culture and introducing standardises systems and approaches, the organisation was able to present results of 20% reduction in customer complaints at the CEM in Telecoms Global Summit earlier this year.

 

Customer experience management in telecoms is clearly not a fad, and requires long term investment from CSP’s. A change in business culture was required in all three of the CSP’s mentioned, and in a number of cases the software systems used also required an overhaul. The ability to bring network, service and customer data into once consolidated system supports a culture change, making it easier to correlate data and resolve issues, inevitably  reducing customer churn and supporting acquisition.

Get in touch to see how Zen Unified Service Assurance Software can support your customer experience management in telecoms.