Marry Your Customers!: Customer Experience Management in Telecommunications

ABOUT THIS BOOK

I, Telco Leader, take thee, Precious Customer, to be my Contracted Partner, to have and to hold, from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in system failure and in excellent network coverage, to care and to cherish, till churn do us part, according to T&Cs binding ordinance; and thereto I pledge myself to you.

Telecommunication service providers have traditionally competed with technology. While technological advancement will continue to stay highly relevant for the industry, the competitive front line has shifted towards customer value and experiences. This 'Marry Your Customers!' book gives customer relationship counselling on:

revealing the naked truth - that customer experiences directly impact the bottom line for telcos; 

using a practical customer experience management framework tried in better and in worse; and

how to use technology to increase customer value and to ensure long-term relationships. 

The Customer Experience Counsellor, Dr Janne Ohtonen, has delivered various challenging customer experience transformation programmes over the past two decades in the telecommunications, travel and retail sectors, several of which included double-digit performance enhancement for the businesses. He now, together with other telco leaders, shares with you the insights and undisclosed strategic approaches that are successfully used by various telecommunication and other organisations around the world today. 

THE BOOK INCLUDES FREE ONLINE MATERIALS AT http://www.threecustomersecrets.com/member

DEDICATION

To those persistent partners, who will not shy away even from difficult circumstances, to add more value to both customers and to the business.

Everything starts with the customer

- Louis XIV, King 1643-1715, France

LET’S GIVE A BIG HAND

Great things happen to those who don't stop believing, trying, learning, and being grateful.

- Roy T. Bennett, Author, The Light in the Heart

I want to thank my family, who have supported me for decades on this road of developing customer experience management methods. The information shared in this book has taken thousands of hours to trial and countless nights away from home. Big thanks to my family and friends for your support and understanding. I am much obliged to Hanna Norvanto-Ohtonen, Daniel Ohtonen, Arja Ohtonen, Jarmo Ohtonen, Mira Ohtonen, Mikael Ohtonen, Minna Karjalainen, Mikko Karjalainen, Toni Karjalainen, Nea Karjalainen, Jukka Norvanto, Miika J. Norvanto, Liisa Norvanto, Elisa Norvanto, Pirita Norvanto, Mikaela Norvanto, Miral Ismail and Janne Saarinen.

Special thank you to The Association of Finnish Non-fiction Writers, TalkTalk Business UK, Tele2 Russia, Black Lion Pictures and Openet for sponsoring this book.

I would like to extend my gratitude to Niall Norton, Tommi Hännikkälä, Tuukka Heinonen, Barry Marron, Enri-k Salazar, Nina Gyubbenet, Danny Sullivan, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Tony Robbins, Robin Sharma, Stephen O’Loughlin, David McGlew, Sean Broderick, Martin Morgan, Pete Tomlinson, Dan Richardson, and Andrew Sweeting.

A big thank you to all those people who write useful books for others to learn from. Finally, the greatest acknowledgement goes to my Lord and Saviour, Jesus Christ, who makes all this possible.

WEDDING MENU

ABOUT THIS BOOK

DEDICATION

LET’S GIVE A BIG HAND

WEDDING MENU

BEST MAN’S SPEECH, BY Niall Norton, CEO, Openet

What Are We Here For?

What An Earth Is Customer Experience Management Supposed To Be?

What CEM Is Not!

What Will Your Business Get Out Of CEM?

May The Force Be With You, CEM

Customer Experience Maturity - Is It Like Getting Married Too Young?

Hear It First-hand: Tele2 Russia

I. Naked Truth: Financial Impact of Customer Experiences

Make Your Owners Happy, puppy

Bring Home The Bacon

Foot The Bill For Customer Acquisition

Oh, Is S/he Going To Leave You?

Don't Layout Money On Operations

Hear It First-hand: Telus Canada

II. Customer Experience Management Framework For Better And For Worse

A CEM Framework? What's That?

Are We Going To Be Customer-Centric Together?

And What Exactly Are We Supposed To Do Anyway?

Epic Customer Journeys  - The Lord Of The Rings Style

Don’t Be An Emotional Train Wreck

Voice Of Customer – Can You Hear It?

Quality of Experience

Marriage Advice by David McGlew,  Director Openet

III. A User Manual For Aligning The Technology To Successful Outcomes

Where Should We Aim To Get With The Technology?

The Focus Recalibration

Customer-Centric Use Cases for Telecoms

Happy Happy Joy Joy Customers

Let's Have a Chat - Channel To Channel

Let's Make the Almighty Dollar to Come Alive

Yes, Of Course, I'm listening

Will You Marry Me?

Have Your Own Digital Butler

Look What I Found, You'll Want One, Too!

What a Pleasant Experience This Has Been

Squeeze the Last Drop Out Of the OPEX

Customer Experience Based Charging

Get Rid of Those Bloody SIM Cards Already!

Please, Don't Leave Me!

We can Learn From Others, too!

Hear It First-hand: TalkTalk Business

Marriage Advice by Enri-k Salazar,  Executive Director, Openet

Happily Ever After

About The AUTHOR

You Might Find These Useful

Catch a Sleep

Back To School

Instead of Netflix

Toilet Reading

People Who Can Help

For Tech Junkies

Finns Who Love Non-Fiction Writers

For Do-Gooders

Rant And Rave

BEST MAN’S SPEECH, BY Niall Norton, CEO, Openet

The topic of Customer Experience Management (CEM) is often misunderstood by those who have not had an opportunity to understand what it really means, and why it is valuable. This book, while focused on the telecommunications industry, contains many truths that apply to every business. And this makes this book important as it provides great insights, and it facilitates the reader's mindset in an approachable manner that explores CEM in a very pragmatic fashion.

Telecommunications is a tough market. Over the past 25 years there have been innovation cycles for services, devices and technology in the vast growth area of allowing people and businesses to communicate more efficiently with each other, it helped share new ways in which people engage with each other, and it allowed the internet to become part of everyday life. In turn, this has increased happiness, relevance and productivity.

For different services, and for various audiences, telecommunications service providers have enjoyed a lifecycle that starts with almost monopoly market dynamics and ended with commoditization. A small number of highly capitalised, licensed, businesses grew the importance and relevance of the sector to unimagined success by providing services that their customers wanted in the most basic area of being able to communicate more efficiently than before.

For many years, the most important features of the services that a telecommunication service provider delivered to its customers were the reliability of the communications and the usability of the devices. These differentiators were for a very long time built on avoiding less than almost perfect systems and high reliability that often-stifled rapid innovation. The consumer, or the business personality of the end-customer (user), was sometimes ranked as third in the scheme of important things.

Over time price competition and the improvements in technology allowed the telecommunications service providers to widen the portfolio of services they provided to their customers. This permitted pretty much ubiquitous and high-speed internet connectivity to almost all customers, and this brought the telecommunications service providers into competition with businesses like their own, and now also with internet service providers.

Internet service providers had evolved in a different arena – one where service delivery was not within their control and therefore was not a differentiator. Price, relevance, and usefulness were the prime elements of the value propositions that emerged for the most successful Internet service providers. The winners had to both know their customer and control the customer's experience as the competition was fierce, and barriers to entry to this market were (and are) low.

Rapid innovation and deep understanding of the end-customers experiences were the key differentiators. Pivoting and segmentation of profiles remain a key attribute for the internet players – the value being emphasised in areas of service consumption and not on the technology of how the service is delivered. Therefore iPhone, iPad and Android killed Nokia devices.

When the internet and telecommunications markets intersected, the internet service providers were very well placed to engage customers and own the relationships, and the telecommunications service providers were slow to adapt to this change. As a result, they have been under significant pressure to retain the value of their place in the value chain in communications – as the end devices and customer engagement channels were taken by other players.

Left with a limited set of tools to compete with for revenues, and perceived parity of connectivity coverage as networks were built out, the telecommunications service providers were left really only with price to compete with in the market. So, revenues declined and the pressure to reduce costs to follow the internet service provider models increased dramatically. But you cannot save your way to greatness – and endless price competition terminates in the graveyard for businesses.

This is all depressing stuff if you are invested in the telecommunications market – whether as a service provider, a vendor or a professional. But happily, it is not the whole story or the end of the story.

Many of the better telecommunications service providers understood in time the dynamics of what was underway and have sought to change their models to being more enabled to compete or co-exist with the internet service providers. There are a number of effective strategies that have been developed by them, including: collaboration with others and bundling of services, creation of their own content, reduction in the complexity and the costs of network management, and perhaps most significantly the development of an appreciation for the value of truly excellent Customer Experience Management.

CEM, as outlined in this book, has huge and tangible business value in terms of churn reduction, loyalty and referrals, increased spend in the telecommunications channel and services tailored to the markets of each customer – all of which increase profitability. The enabling technologies allow telecommunications service providers to deliver on CEM in ways just not possible a few years ago. And things are changing. I am an optimist and hope that this book will further help with this change by helping shape a growth mindset in the CEM area.

CEM is not a strategy for a business – it is a cultural aspiration. It changes the end-customer perception, creates trust and helps make sure that the provider of services is providing value. It is built on customer understanding and knowledge. And it means that the providers of services must understand what a customer actually values and finds relevant. This type of relationship cannot be automated or faked – it must be sincere and consistent. This book sets out, far more elegantly than I can, how to achieve this goal for a service provider, and I believe that this will be fundamental in the telecommunications industry looking forward.

I started my journey in business in the finance area and flirted with technology and other hardened disciplines before I truly appreciated the importance of the customer experience and how this translates to real economic value. But, once understood, it is impossible not to see its importance is all industries and endeavours. ‘Marry Your Customers’ is a pretty accurate title for this book – it certainly helped me in marrying the mindset.

Niall Norton

CEO

Openet

What Are We Here For?

"We see our customers as invited guests to a party, and we are the hosts. It’s our job every day to make every important aspect of the customer experience

a little bit better."

- Jeff Bezos, Founder, Amazon

What An Earth Is Customer Experience Management Supposed To Be?

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.

- Warren Buffet, Money Guru, USA

Reminding you of the many stories that are known well by all of us around the world on how customer experiences can affect business is probably not necessary. Most of us remember how United Airlines first broke guitars¹ and then committed domestic violence by throwing customers out from their planes². I am sure you have many stories of your own (especially if you happened to be a Vodafone customer in the recent years³) of things gone wrong with your customer experiences.

But that’s not the point. The point is that any marriage can be broken with enough abuse from either of the partners. In divorce, you may end up losing half of what you have, but in a break-up with the customer you lose it all! And no worries, this isn’t just marketing talk to scare people off like North Korea’s alleged nuclear program⁴, but comes with a tangible impact on your revenue (more on that in the next chapter on the financial impact of the Customer Experience Management).

There are various definitions of Customer Experience Management (CEM) as we will soon discuss, but if we boil down the purpose of CEM, it comes to:

RETAINING existing customers in a sustainable way

ACQUIRING new customers in a sustainable way

Maximising operational EFFECTIVENESS through LeanCEM

I understand it may come as a shock not to see things like ‘increasing the number of satisfied customers’ and ‘improving the Net Promoter Score’ on the list. But this is the thing: they are a means to an end. And the purpose of the CEM should be SUSTAINABLE GROWTH for the business delivered through optimised OPERATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS. This book is full of hard messages, but this actually may be one of the hardest ones. Especially for the top leadership. CEM is not about creating short-term profit by any means necessary. It is not only about this or the next quarter. It is about ensuring the business is healthy today, tomorrow and the next year (not to mention the many years after that); EVEN IF IT MEANS LESS MONEY TODAY!

And that’s hard to swallow. I get it. If the firm measures you by quarterly and financial year results, then the long-term focus is difficult. But it just has to be done. Otherwise, there’s no future for the business in the long-term. And that is where CEM can help you. It gives practical tools for ensuring the company will stay relevant for its customers for a long time to come.

Is forgiving others challenging for you? If it is, you are not alone on that⁵. And that is also what Warren Buffet is referring to in the above quote. It’s hard to get the customers to come in, and when things go wrong, they get angry quickly and forgive slowly. It’s painful really. So, what we use CEM for is to optimise the likelihood of a positive experience and deal swiftly and appropriately with situations where the experience goes wrong. CEM is all about the customer love, so take your rainbow banners out, you’ll need them!

From the perspective of the whole of society, such short-sightedness has a massive impact on our daily lives and happiness. Companies that are unwilling to deliver the value they produce in the best possible way are creating Moments of Miseries for people who are victims of such practices. Just have a look at the faces of people at the Victoria Station in London when they exit the Sothern Railways trains. You won’t see any smiles being exchanged there. And no wonder, Southern being the most unpunctual train operator in the whole