Customer Experience / Service Quality Management

Analyzing Performance through the Customer's Glasses

Daniel ODonnell — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 18:11:11 GMT

I have worn glasses since I was ten. It started when I could not read the backboard from my desk. I asked to be put in the first row. Then I would scoot my desk up closer to the blackboard a little at a time so no one would notice. Eventually I was so close to the blackboard that everyone noticed and my teacher recommended to my parents that I see an eye doctor.

On the way home from the eye doctor, fitted with my new glasses I was amazed at the world around me. The full moon was not really a fuzzy white ball. There were edges and shadows that I never saw before. My view of the moon was skewed and I did not know it. I saw the fuzzy ball and I believed that was the moon. However, the moon was actually quite different than what I saw and believed.

Today, Communications Service Providers (CSP) typically use surveys from customer contacts with various departments such as Billing, Support, Service and Sales. These surveys are compared to Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and attempt to gauge customer satisfaction and retention likely hood. There are questions with this methodology including the accuracy of the survey data, the timeliness of the reporting and whether the data truly reflects the overall customer experience.

Accurate measurement and true understanding of the customer experience is the most critical component of CSP business management. Delighting customers with a positive experience every time is the key to customer retention, selling new services, increasing the customer base and growing revenue. Here comes the exciting news…a better ways to see and understand the customer experience is being developed.

CSPs have a very rich source of customer experience data at their fingertips. It is their network. The problem, heretofore, has been accessing, capturing, retrieving, analyzing and presenting the massive amounts of data on the network. There are billions of calls set up and torn down every day. There are petabytes of data passing through the network every second. Surfacing KPIs from live data can provide a clear, timely and actionable picture of the customer experience.

Through a collaboration sponsored by the TM Forum and championed by Telecom Italia, Network Critical, Ventraq, IBM Netezza, and The Now Factory are developing a CEM solution that integrates data analytics to better understand and improve the customer experience. Phase I of the project was presented at Management World Americas in Orlando last week and received keen interest from the CSP community.

This ground breaking work allows massive amounts of data to be analyzed and crystallized into manageable, understandable indices for executive reporting and follow-up action. This is not just network performance and dropped calls. This system will also analyze protocols and applications that are beyond network control yet have a significant impact on the customer. It will also help CSPs understand how their network is being used. Are people downloading music, playing games, checking email, connecting with others over social media? This data goes beyond network level performance and provides critical information for network dimensioning and helping the CSP manage the user experience.

Advancing CEM using data analytics puts the focus on the customer first. It allows CSPs to see a new, clearer view of their customers that was not possible before. The fuzzy white ball that was the customer is now a very sharp circle with shadows, hills and valleys. With the customer in clear focus, the opportunities to enhance the customer experience are endless.

Steve Jobs 1955-2011: The Genius Of Customer Experience

Shai Shamir — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 18:00:33 GMT

Steve Jobs 1955-2011: The Genius Of Customer Experience

When it comes to defining and shaping the customer experience, Steve Jobs (and Apple) is probably king. Here’s to the sad passing of a great innovator, visionary and master of the customer experience.

All "aTwitter" About Social Media and Customer Experience

Steven Cotton — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 16:01:09 GMT

The recent troubles in Egypt has once again gotten the chattering class all excited about the role of social media in mass movement protests. A recent article published on the Stratfor web site thoroughly discusses the power and limitations of social media as a tool for protest, and it brought to mind an executive roundtable discussion I attended last November at Management World Americas in Orlando where there was quite a bit of emphasis on social media as a powerful customer relationship and experience measurement channel.

Some of the same limitations to the power of social media that are in the above-referenced article would seem to carry over to the customer arena in our industry. It's a well-understood phenomenon that any medium for direct or indirect communications between a customer and a company is used overwhelmingly for complaints. Human nature is such that the inclination to share positive news just doesn't have the same energy as does negative.

As the Revenue Management Initiative takes up the Customer Experience Group's oversight, based on the fundamental relationship of Customer Satisfaction to Willingness to Pay, it will behoove us all to maintain a sober balance in our consideration of the importance of social media relative to the larger subject of satisfying the customer's value equation to earn the revenues that we want to manage through the lean enterprise into profits.

I “like” my service provider!

Shai Shamir — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 10:24:19 GMT

If you use Facebook, then you’re probably familiar with the “like” button which you show whether you like or agree with something that’s been posted. However for service providers, most of the time that they get feedback from customers is unfortunately as part of the trouble-to-resolution or complaint-to-resolution process when they DON’T “like” your service

When a customer consumes a specific service ranging from a voice call, video on demand, or visiting a retail store, in most of the cases, you’ll only get his opinion about the level of the service if something went wrong. This doesn’t have to be the case: for example, Skype allows consumers to rate their satisfaction by asking a simple question at the end of the call. But how many service providers offer the same option regarding their pay-per-view service?

You might say that surveys already provide this type of feedback, but they’re not “real time” and are filled in a long time after the experience and in most cases the service provideר can’t properly handle the massive issue raised by the customers.

If service providers could support an equivalent of a "like” button close to the occurrence of the service, it will provide them with a much more useful and accurate feedback tool, enabling them to analyze and handle the issues as they happen. Maybe it’s time to create a new business process flow: compliment-to-improvement?

Why even Apple could improve its customer experience…

Shai Shamir — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 08:41:18 GMT

Most people associate Apple with a great customer experience without thinking twice, helped along by Apple’s impressive online ITunes and app stores, sleek retail stores and stylish devices. But following the launch of the new iPhone 4 onto the market, we found out that even Steve Jobs can make huge customer-experience mistakes.

Within a few hours of the launch, a customer sent a direct e-mail to Steve Jobs complaining that when he places his hands on the iPhone’s steel bands, the iPhone loses its reception. And although I’m sure that each service provider has scripts guiding employees on how best to answer customer complaints, I’m not sure that Steve Jobs (or the person who answered the query in Steve Jobs’ name) was following one: “You're holding the phone the wrong way”.

Huh?

It’s estimated that Apple sold 1.5 million iPhone 4s on the first day alone so as you can imagine more than a few people were interested in that somewhat ridiculous response. It didn’t take long for that statement to work its way around media channels and blogs worldwide, and people were quick to find and redistribute Apple-made ads for the iPhone ironically showing people using their iPhone with their fingers on the metal bands, and to state: “Hey Apple, you're holding it wrong…”

As of today, there have been 517,000 results on Google Search regarding this problem. Obviously, even customer experience experts can’t afford to get lax about the customer experience and there’s always for improvement.

The whole thing reminded me instantly about a joke my grandfather used to tell me: “A man steps into the doctor’s office and tells the doctor that when he holds his hand above his head, it hurts. The doctor replied with a simple answer: “So don’t hold it like that”.

Sounds familiar? But there is one main difference – that was actually meant to be a joke…

Keeping a promise

Shai Shamir — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 12:58:49 GMT

Customers have more control than ever before which is great news for me as a consumer. I have loads of devices, functionality and service providers to choose from, although it’s true that it can be hard to resist the lure of a brand. When customers buy a product or service, sometimes it’s down to the fact that they have certain expectations of the customer experience that should come together with it – especially if it’s a strong brand – ranging from the products, packaging, price, marketing, to the sales and support personnel. They expect that a certain quality and type of experience will be delivered along with it as a sort of promise.

And by promises, I’m not just referring to being able to fulfill complex service level agreements (SLAs) regarding the quality of service. I’m also referring to the most basic elements of customer experience management such as calling a customer back, which can impact the customer experience (even if it’s not a brand-related one) and make or break the relationship.

This is even more important at specific “moments of truth” or touch points, such as calling a customer to try to up-sell a service and the customer asks for a call back again on a specific day, or time. Or perhaps the call center is too overloaded so the customer is asked to leave contact details so a support rep can come back to him back a little later. And how about making sure technicians show up at the time they’re supposed to?

As minor as these promises seem to be, whether or not service providers keep them can add up to playing an important a part of customer experience management as being able to provide new innovative services. After all, customer loyalty is much more fickle these days, and armed with number portability, customers who aren’t locked tight into a contract know they can move around fairly easily in search of better bundles and price plans. I’ve done it myself actually – I’ve changed both my cable and mobile service providers, and swapped devices. And it’s not just the cost and range of different services that can tempt us away – sometimes it comes down to frustration at broken quality-of-service promises.

The customer experience can't be left to chance. The promise needs to be actively designed, controlled and reinforced across every customer touchpoint. Otherwise it can put the entire value of the customer experience at risk.

Has the average handling time now run out?

Shai Shamir — Wed, 05 May 2010 12:45:42 GMT

In the movie “Outsourced”,the management of an American novelty products company ends up doing everything it can to reduce its average handling time (AHT). Whether that is or isn't the right road for the retail industry to follow is debatable, but I don’t think it’s the right trouble-resolution approach for service providers to take.

A while ago, my wife and I upgraded our old devices to similar new phones which came with a new attractive bundle. However, whenever I tried to send a photo that I had taken with the new phone, I received an error message. It took four very frustrating phone calls to customer serviceto finally solve the problem (although at the end of each call, I was promisedthat the functionality would now do what it was supposed to.)

When my wife called regarding the same problem, they managed to resolve it on the first call. And no, it wasn’t because they were using agreat device-management knowledge base which guided the agent into solving theproblem. It was simply because I was forced to step in and help, since from my own recent personal experience, I now understood precisely what information my wife needed to pass on to the agent in order to solve the problem .

During my own conversations with the agents, I found that each time, they were ridiculously eager to finish the call, presumably so they could keep their average handling times low. But using a low average handlingtime metric to judge performance is a mistake, resulting in poor service, lowersales/up-sell/cross-sell, more call backs (four in my case), more complaintsand a poor return on investment. And from the agents’ point of view,average handling time is a metric which largely depends on circumstances and situations which can’t be controlled by the agent, including the type of calls taken, the type and language of the customer, the number and complexity ofquestions or complaints, changes in processes or scripts, the system responsetime, and the onboarding and training of new agents. Any service provider who chooses to focus on the average handling time as a key performance indicator may find it costs them a lot more because it will end up hurting the customer experience. And a poor experience might end up affecting the views of more than just one frustrated customer if that customer decides to vent using social media.

Speaking as a frustrated customer myself, the first-call resolution metric is what they should be aiming for. If I get my problem efficiently solved the first time, I’ll remember that experience as clearly as I’ll remember a poor customer experience. And I might even tweet about it too.

AT&T's Lurie on Customer Experience

Stephen Fleece — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 20:55:11 GMT

Quick blog post here... I read a great interview article with Glenn Lurie (AT&T's iPhone deal guy) in Fierce Wireless and includes Q&A on CSP culture and Customer Experience "LGBUPS model--very similar to what we call touch points across the Customer Experience Lifecycle...
http://www.fiercebroadbandwireless.com/story/ts-lurie-taking-risks-and-changing-business-models/2010-03-16

Lots to learn from this interview.

Stephen
twitter: sfleece_tmforum

MCE & Data Integration

Stephen Fleece — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 22:36:31 GMT

An interesting, research-based outside blog post on data integration and customer experience by Teresa Cottam...
http://www.microsperience.com/?p=1305

Impact of QoS on customer experience once the service is assured

Antonio Cuadra-Sanchez — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 14:23:44 GMT

The relationship between the quality of service and its impact on the quality of experience seems to vary on time depending on the degree of development and stabilization of the service and the underlying network.

This would mean that once the service is assured, its quality of perception will relay stronger on other subjective parameters (KEI) rather than QoS indicators (KQI/KPI).

This way, for PSTN/PLMN services, the quality of experience for voice services (with usual ASR/NER parameters exceeds the 99,9%) will depend on Key Experience Indicators (KEI) such as previous experiences, competition expectations or recommendations received amongst others.

What is your experience?