A Leadership Perspectives White Paper

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1 A Leadership Perspectives White Paper Technology-led Customer Experience Enhancement Recommended approaches for CIO/CTO leadership Executive Summary The mantra of customer-centric business has some major ramifications for the CIO and CTO. IT leadership is tasked with developing strategies which ensure their organisations have agile business infrastructures that can adapt to fast-changing customer demand, and information systems that provide genuine insight into the nature of the customer experience being delivered. Much can be learned from progressive telco companies, who are leveraging their numerous customer touch points to deliver business services and functional capabilities that drive a consistently rich customer experience.

2 Business case overview For most organisations, customer experience has become synonymous with customer care, something that resides with the customer service department and the contact centre staffs. This is no longer the case in the telco sector, which is setting the pace in the adoption of a range of customer interaction and customer experience management technologies that can be used in conjunction with more wellestablished customer relationship management applications. Customer-centric service delivery For many businesses in the telco sector, customer experience has become the focus of major strategic initiatives, which put the customer at the very heart of business operations and as the focal point of major business transformation activities. In Europe, several operators have announced some wide-ranging restructuring plans as part of their bid to get closer to the customer. These include Belgacom, FT, KPN, Swisscom, TDC, Telecom Italia and Telefonica. The extent of the business changes proposed has varied greatly by operator: Telstra restructured its business around twelve customer segments. The outstanding customer experience programme at Orange Business Services became a key part of its business- and organisation-transformational programme. BT made being number one for customer service in the UK one of its prime corporate goals. Belgacom, KPN and Swisscom went beyond simply re-labelling business divisions according to customer segments and have worked to integrate and realign their sales teams, marketing and business processes around the customer and the customer experience. In the Middle East, du has launched a major customer experience programme that operates on several levels. Notably, it includes engagements with top C-level executives of key accounts and partners, who convene periodically as a Customer Advisory Board. This comprises members drawn from the top companies in the UAE and includes some of the biggest and most established names from the region and beyond. In all cases, these initiatives could be viewed as being highly strategic continuous improvement programmes, which allow the company s executive teams drive high-impact change initiatives. These incrementally enhance the customer experience, helping fine-tune existing operations or realign new product/service development plans to take advantage of feedback and other customer insights. Telco experiences in customer experience - lessons learned Whether a customer regards a product or service experience as good or bad is a subjective judgment. Analysts argue that one over-riding goal should be the provision of an intentional customer experience - no more and no less. One of the lessons learned in the telco sector is that consistency of the customer interaction is a highly important consideration in delivering a positive customer experience (and a complication given the number of interaction channels that are

3 becoming available, from fixed telephone to web, , mobile and interactive TV set-top box). In this light, telcos are looking to adopt tools that monitor the end-to-end customer experience. In doing so, that customer experience should become more predictable and controlled so it can then be systematically improved. It is a basic premise, but one which businesses rarely execute effectively. In customer service scenarios, for example, it is not uncommon for three or four customers with the same problem to call on different occasions and ask the same question, and be given three or four different answers. Telco companies are also adapting new metrics to better gauge this type of customer service experience. For example, the number of calls answered in a specific time has long been a key metric for call centres. Now it is considered more important to address the customer s problem in one call, rather than deal with the request quickly by directing them to another help desk or service support number. Metrics that quantify the number of instances of tell me once and right first time calls, as well as cycle time reduction time are increasingly seen as vital KPIs for business wanting to drive positive improvements in customer experience. Equally, customers are looking for evidence of show-me-you-know-me, with company agents and customer representatives always having the relevant and specific customer data to hand, so avoiding having to repeatedly quiz the customer for their details. Assembling the right technology infrastructure for QoE Key to delivering an enhanced customer experience is in bridging the divide between what a customer actually experiences and what the business thinks they are experiencing. Customer experience problems tend to be caused by odd combinations of individually obscure details that are hard to identify. The culprits include: poor coordination of business processes. poor systems integration or customer data quality. poor usability or technical problems related to user or service delivery. poor usability of systems used by customercare agents. HR issues, such as poor staff training, high turnover or staff shortages in critical areas. lack of capacity causing service bottlenecks and outages. limited real-time visibility of resources, network and systems performance. problems with third-party systems. In telcos, traditional approaches to service assurance will flag up service problems, but they do not provide any indication of how satisfied customers are with the service being delivered. A need to manage the end-to-end customer experience is therefore increasing the scope of the service assurance function from simply making sure a service is working, to making sure that the customer is receiving a predefined level or Quality of Experience (QoE). Traditional service assurance tools fail to provide the real-time information that is needed for QoE. This is fueling investment in next-generation service assurance systems that do monitor services end-to-end, and are able to track defined customer experience KPIs, correlating more closely with QoE. Business intelligence analytics, service assurance and testing, and customer master data management (MDM) have been identified as the three IT domains with the greatest potential to make the broadest impact on the customer experience.

4 1. Business intelligence analytics assessment Existing customer data is the foundation for forwardlooking strategies for customer experience enhancement around sales, marketing and service. The greater the level of understanding, the greater the ability to provide what is needed, and to anticipate future needs. As decision cycles compress, the ability to model potential outcomes is becoming more important in enabling organisations to prevent problems and respond to events - expected and unexpected. The greater the time pressure, the greater the risk of poor decisions, so analytics can play a significant role in risk management, providing a framework for fast, repeatable, fact-based decision-making. By making analytics available to a wide group of employees, through cloud-based operational systems like customer relationship management, risk can be reduced across the enterprise. Analytic processes can bring value to most areas of business, but using them to gain customer insight is one of the most valuable. Changes in business dynamics that leave organisations less able to differentiate on product or price make management of the customer experience more important than ever before. Customer acquisition is costly, so the more efficient the process, the more acquisition-related losses can be reduced, while better quality customer experiences translate to higher profitability over the customer lifecycle. CUSTOMER OPERATIONS NETWORK OPERATIONS Real-time customer analytics Integrated order management Self Service End-to-end service assurance Convergent charging Performance monitoring & analysis Business intelligence Testing Master data management TERMINALS PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT AND MARKETING Device platforms and tools User interfaces Usability Usage monitoring & analysis Device management & security Personalisation Service discovery Content lifecycle management Great customer experience lies within the domains of BI analytics, service assurance and MDM. In the various stages of that lifecycle, analytics can be used to understand customer activity patterns and changes detected in their interactions, what they buy, relationships between purchased products and services, and so on. All sorts of insightful and actionable information can be derived, e.g. Does a change in the frequency of interaction indicate a growing level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the customer experience being delivered? What combinations of products or services work well together and for what types of customers? Which customers are profitable/non-profitable, and how does the customer experience impact on that outcome? Improved insight into the customer experience requires a shift from historic reporting to forward-looking analytics. In leveraging existing customer relationship management and analytics technologies, CIO/CTO teams can increase the value of both by tackling the analytics last mile to deliver relevant decision support to the point of need. And in using customer relationship management to surface insights that can improve customer experience management they will increase profitability levels, now and in the future.

5 2. Scoping a quality service assurance experience Service assurance is increasing in importance and scope, driven by the growing importance of the customer experience as a means of differentiating product and service offerings. To recap, this is driving a shift from monitoring and assuring service quality (essentially ensuring the customer experience is delivered), towards management of the QoE. There is a need to define customer experience in terms of a set of KPIs that can be monitored, and develop an end-toend or 360 degree view of the customer experience. There is a new generation of service assurance tools which are being deployed to monitor a customer s subjective experience, unlike previous generations which measured technical events that do not always reflect what the customer actually experienced. In this context, service assurance is fast becoming the link between an organisation s operational support functions and its customer-facing business support functions. In the field a number of telco companies are starting to implement solutions that allow them to provide customer care agents with a real-time view of the status of their networks and services, as well as the ability to implement over-the-air updates to end-user devices. This is allowing them to increase their right-first-time metrics in customer care, while also allowing enterprise account managers to proactively manage their client relationships when problems occur in the delivery of the customer experience. As well as being seen as a churn blocker by helping sustain customer loyalty, such tools are also leading to a reduction in the number of trouble tickets flowing from customer care, thereby reducing operator costs. In moving from monitoring QoS to QoE, telcos are developing and implementing a set of KPIs that extend beyond traditional QoS KPIs (which focus on service reliability/availability), and are adding a new range of indicators that aim to define the quality of each service from the customer s perspective. These KPIs are monitored using passive and active monitoring processes, combined with analysis, and translated into KQIs (key quality indicators), which can be aggregated over time and then mapped to SLAs to measure compliance. Thresholds can be assigned to the KQIs based on their SLA commitments, which trigger events/alarms at the service desk or network operating centre when breached. 3. Mastering the art of customer data management Creation of a consolidated customer database which cuts across multiple product and service lines and aggregates customer intelligence across the organisation is usually viewed as a cornerstone of any customer intimacy strategy. Analysts stress that over-ambitious plans can drastically push the scope of these projects, while poor data management practices can lead to difficulties when exploiting the considerable wealth of customer data for marketing and strategic customer experience investigations. A good place to start, they recommend, is with master data management, which provides a process to ensure the consistency, accuracy and accountability of core customer information assets. Data contained within customer relationship management systems is a prime source of information, but the Experience expectations of the connected consumer greatest level of insight comes from linking information of different types and thus requires data from multiple sources and business functions. This enables broader questions to be asked and richer answers produced. It is also necessary to consider different, non-traditional types of data that can be contained in customer responses to campaigns, in web store logs and analytics, in service calls (assisted and self-service), and in s, which are often unstructured but can be analysed to provide insight into customer experience histories. Another source of information, still emerging but increasingly valuable, is web-based resources such as blogs and social networks whose content can be mined to discover attitudes and intent. These non-transactional types of information help to answer more complex questions and to determine customer sentiment and intent. Consumers are using social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter for diverse reasons, and thanks to new social media monitoring tools companies can begin to inject themselves into these channels for customer conversations. Social network-based customer interactions drive increased intimacy between company and customer. Some businesses have been quick to see the potential and have started to foster online forums and blogs, and sites that carry customer-generated feedback, reputation ratings and performance scores for their people, product and services. They are then incorporating this intelligence into their voice of the customer programmes.

6 Interaction data > /chat > Call centre notes > Web click streams > Dialogues Additional data > Opinions > Preferences > Needs > Desires Descriptive data > Attributes > Characteristics > Self-declared info > Geo-demograpic information Behavioural data > Orders > Transactions > Payment history > Usage history Developing a 360 degree customer view These interactions can also be integrated into customer service operations. Now, using social media monitoring, a company can detect when a customer blogs or tweets a complaint about a poor customer experience. They can reach out to that customer and offer personalised support or offer remediation, and work to defuse an incident before it becomes a trend that could adversely affect its Net Promoter Score. Analysts believe there is a key role for the CIO/CTO here, as customer advocates, taking their technical insights to the business and melding systems that build these new generation agile platforms that provide a sustainable strategy for customer intimacy. u A mandate for technology-led customer experience enhancement Agenda item 1 Allocate an IT-led business relationship management team tasked to expose, collate and benchmark meaningful and easily measurable customer experience metrics. Agenda item 2 Examine the tools that have become available to monitor the end-to-end customer experience, and work to drive a more consistent, predictable and controlled customer experience - which can be then systematically improved. Agenda item 3 Prescribe regular technology horizon scanning exercises, and assess service provider future roadmap plans, and look for ways the service assurance function can start the move towards monitoring, measuring and improving the Quality of Experience (QoE). This is the first in a regular series of Leadership Perspectives White Papers, produced by du marketing in association with Ovum, a preferred knowledge partner For more information, please leadershipseries@du.ae or visit