How to keep your clients loyal in an age of fearce IT competitivity
Interesting times
The mobile industry in the UK is undergoing what could charitably be called “interesting times,” in the words of a traditional Chinese curse. Interesting, because the challenges faced by those marketing their services have never been so extreme: virtually everyone already owns a mobile handset and has a mobile service, revenues from voice and text are falling with new legislative rules by the operator’s watchdog Ofcom and the rise of the Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNOs). Furthermore, there is little to differentiate one operator’s proposition from another.
With the increased choice, and decreased points of differentiation — people just don’t care too much about who their operator is.
What does keep customers loyal is how they relate to a brand, and how well they feel it treats them. There is growing recognition of this, as operators increasingly advertise their proposition for existing consumers — a panda does not forget its cubs indeed.
Something that impacts strongly on brand perception and another crucial cause of the rising spectre of customer churn is the inadequate experience customers have when trying to interact with their operator’s support desk. The extent to which this is a problem, however, is poorly understood.
The impact of poor customer service
A recent poll [1] of 2,000 people across the UK population, conducted by well-known researchers YouGov, showed that consumers are jumping ship in significant numbers due to a poor experience with operator call centres. One in five fed-up mobile users has defected at some point.
Particularly startling is the fact that amongst the valuable youth demographic (18-29 year-olds), who are meant to be making money for operators by buying premium digital content, churn is significantly higher: one in four has abandoned their operator.
Despite the fact that operators are taking an increasingly focussed view on their customer service proposition, consumers are still being kept on the line at the call centre for much longer than they’d like. The same research shows that 31% of callers are kept on the line for 10 minutes or more while their enquiry is being dealt with, with a small but significant proportion being forced to wait for an hour or more. Clearly this is unacceptable in a society that grows ever more busy, and ever more impatient, with each passing year.
Whilst churn is a matter-of-fact in the in industry, operators cannot afford to get blasé about it, and need to understand the extent to which customer interactions at the call centre contribute to it. When brand value decreases as a result, operator efforts at expanding into additional services and sources of revenue, such as broadband access or wireless hotspot provision, will be undermined.
It starts and ends at the call centre
Although there are an increasing number of methods for telcos to interact with their customers, including self-service tools on the web and mobiles, the call centre remains the best point for entering into a relationship with customers and yet it is often taken for granted. Despite being the one place where operators can actively engage with their subscriber base, it almost seems an afterthought, and is rarely, if ever, an active part of their proposition.
Whilst a call centre is not the easiest thing in the world to get right, it is certainly not something to be ignored: nor should it be assumed that the approach of implementing more and more expensive CRM systems will necessarily solve all customer service issues.
With high staff churn, repetitive work and a job that will probably get you shouted at by complete strangers on a daily basis, the tools given to the agents who serve at your customer service gateway need to work for them, and not against them. It is a reality that agents struggle with IT systems, and are forced to negotiate multiple different applications in order to field a customer query. Another recent research project conducted by Dynamic Markets [2] found that 66% of UK call centre agents have to use three applications or more to serve customers on a typical call, with 27% using five or more.
For example, during the course of a fairly standard call from a mobile phone user to add a new service to their account, an agent will have to interact with the billing system to pull up customer details and add the new cost, the credit check system to make sure the customer is good for it, and the provisioning system to activate the service. We refer to performing this process, across three to four applications and multiple screens, as “swivel chair integration”. It causes delay, as agents stumble across the applications re-entering the same customer details – and aggravates the customer who just wants to upgrade his text bundle from 30 to 60 inclusive texts a month.
A call to action
Operators need to see this YouGov research into customer churn as a call to action; to recognise that many of the problems for their customer service proposition start with agents struggling with this “swivel-chair integration” process, keeping 31% of consumers waiting for 10 minutes whilst dealing with queries.
With consumers being increasingly demanding, having more and more choice, and with the increasing commoditisation of mobile services, differentiators like a solid customer service proposition will make the crucial difference between, say, 25% and 20% churn – substantial numbers for operators with 15 million customers apiece.
[1] Keeping your customers: how call centre service can impact mobile consumer churn Corizon/YouGov 2005
[2] Life at the call centre coal face: A report from Corizon, Dynamic Markets, 2004
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