Rogers Communications, Canada’s largest telecom provider with nearly 10 million subscribers, had used several different metrics as the basis to “try to move the needle” in terms of improving customer satisfaction and loyalty, but none made very much of a difference, Maria Churchill, Rogers vice president, service strategy and program management told an audience at the 8th edition Customer Experience Conference in Chicago on Tuesday.
“We had a lot of different customer metrics,” Churchill said. “The first step was to create a vision of where we wanted to go, what we wanted to do and what we wanted to deliver to customers. We wanted to a solution that was seamless, reliable and worked from end to end.”
As soon as there was a customer interaction such as an order for service, an upgrade or a billing complaint, all necessary processes (fulfillment, etc.) had to start moving at once to avoid any bottlenecks in managing the customer experience, Churchill said. Rogers wanted to eliminate any “pain points,” with basic improvements delivered across all customer touchpoints.
Critical in development of the strategy was asking customers what they expected, Churchill added.
The next step was to change from department-by-department silos of reporting customer experience metrics, with no real method to pull everything together to a centralized system that measured a wide variety of metrics, and reporting them from the bottom up throughout the organization.
“We needed to deliver a single version of the truth to all off our channels,” Churchill said.
With such a system, it was easy to see how different metrics, like customer complaints, affected performance, not only vertically, like corporate profits, but also, when appropriate, horizontally. For example, a customer complaint about an outage would be communicated to the tech department, so tech managers would understand how their work impacted the customer experience, Churchill said.
“We actually spent more time selling it (e.g., to the tech department) than we did installing it,” Churchill added.
Rogers Communications experience is similar to that of many companies, said Chris Randall, vice president of client services for ResponseTek, which developed the customer experience measurement platform that Rogers now uses. There are several different metrics for loyalty, customer satisfaction, problem resolution and a myriad of other results that a company can measure. The choice is to determine which of these measurements has the most impact on the customer experience.
From there, companies have to determine how to improve those metrics that are the most likely to improve the bottom line, Randall said. The company also has to take into account the cost of changing any of these metrics.
“There is no silver bullet,” Randall cautioned. “And executives have to realize that they are no longer at the center of any changes. Those who are managing people are at the center of change. Improvements will be smaller in size, but companies need to offer the support and processes needed for the improvements.”
Another important factor in improving the customer experience is understanding that the while a company may see a customer complaint as a one-way communication, not all customers see it that way. However, it’s not cost effective to engage in a dialogue for every customer complaint, Randall added. So it’s important for companies to determine which customer complaints should result in dialogues.