Customer Care
- Improve Your Customers' Experience
- Reduce the unit cost of serving them
- Focus your staff resources on adding even more value
Telecommunications has become a very narrow margin business, particularly since de-regulation.
With new competition, Telcos had to find a
way of differentiating themselves, and in many cases their first
move was to cut prices.While this has enormously benefitted customers it has put big pressure on the Telco's OPEX lines.
Older (particularly pre de-regulation) Telcos are generally carrying a much larger cost base than they can afford, given the revenue streams that they're currently generating.
At the same time, market conditions put huge pressure on Telcos to introduce new and better services, faster, better and quicker than ever before.
With revenue upside limited, the only way that Telcos can develop long term resilience and greater profitability is if they dramatically reduce their OPEX.
And one of the areas where there's a huge opportunity to do this is in the operations supporting customers: order management, call centres and customer service operations.
The customer self service portal - web self care - is, to my mind, essential to any Telco's longer term profitability.
The technology is available today to provide customers with:
- An excellent level of responsiveness to questions
- Tailored and targetted upsell/cross-sell offers in a non intrusive way
- Help to correct handset and other problems - reducing 'no fault found' handset exchanges and unnecessary engineer visits
- The ability to make payments and check call and bill details
- The ability to change their address and contact details
- The ability to buy new services and make changes to existing services
... all without any human intervention.
My favourite examples of companies that do all of these things exceptionally well are Amazon (targetted upsell/cross-sell), Skype (troubleshooting Q & A), HSBC (general account maintenance) and McAfee (use of Chat functions to manage multiple customer queries simultaneously).
Additionally there are a number of web based technologies and systems that enable enlightened organisations to get involved with their customers on a day to day basis.
Services like Twitter, Google Alerts and Blogs all provide powerful ways for telcos to manage their customer relationships and their reputation far more effectively than was possible previously.
A web based customer care strategy is essential to any Telco's longer term profitability. It will dramatically reduce the unit cost of serving customers while greatly improving the customer experience.
White Papers and Downloads
I've put up a .pdf file that highlights the areas I address and the questions that I typically ask at the outset of a Customer Care review. Of course, each specific situation varies and I approach each assignment individually.
You can download it here:
Download the Customer Care Areas and Questions
And here's a white paper that discusses why a telecom provider should move its business online, the benefits of doing so and some of the challenges that will need to be addressed.
You can download it here:
Download the eStrategy white paper.
I've also put up a summary of the various customer care related projects I've successfully completed.
You can download it here:
Download Martin Malden's Customer Care Skills and Experience.
Contact Me
To discover how I can help your company to develop an effective web-based customer care strategy please contact me:
Call me on +852 9238 9998
Or...
Email Me.
And, for some more information...
Check out my blog: click here.