Our COO's tips to win more business through customer experience
Customer Experience is the new battlefield
89% of companies expect to compete mostly on customer experience, versus 36% when asked the same question four years ago. The more agile your business is, the easier it becomes to adapt to your customers’ changing needs, and the better your long-term results will be. By keeping your customer experience responsive, simple and honest, you’ll easily stand out in the market.
At this year’s Comms Vision, I had the pleasure of speaking to some of our Partners and sharing the ways we’re improving our customer experience as part of our objective to become ‘easy to do business with’. I’ve summarised some of what I shared in this blog.
What does ‘easy to do business with’ mean for you?
In an increasingly complicated industry, we’re on a mission to be easy to do business with. The easier we are to do business with, the more value we can pass onto our Partners, and the more value you can pass onto your customers.We use four key principles to guide our customer experience:
- Simplicity - our APIs and Portals enable our Partners to spend more time selling to customers and less time resolving issues.
- Empowerment – we’ve empowered our teams to take end-to-end accountability for any issues which reduces hand-off points (especially if you’re buying multiple products) saving Partners time, and therefore money.
- Multiskilling – we’ve invested in structured training and development throughout the company, so there are more skilled people available to help you.
- Collaboration – our cross-functional One Customer Desk has a single point of ownership for faster resolution, so you won’t be passed from pillar to post to resolve your query.
Your feedback is vital
The most successful businesses are the ones that listen to their customers and learn from the feedback.
We take our CSAT very seriously: every quarter we conduct in-depth interviews with our Partners. The feedback gathered in these interviews help us to improve our service year on year and drives real change.
Automate for a better experience
Automating processes can make your operations more responsive, proactive, and in some cases, personalised. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), there are a variety of options for you to use automation to improve your customer experience.
Here are some of the examples of automation we’re working on at TalkTalk Business:
Robotics
Our industry still relies heavily on email and non APIS processes as update mechanisms. That’s why we’ve invested heavily in robotics (Blue Prism) to extract the pertinent information from core email processes such as deemed consent updates (we currently electronically process 2500 Clarity Engineering updates and 5000 Deemed Consent emails a week).
From these emails we can distil the pertinent detail and automatically update the Partner and their own systems.
Big Data Mining
We have over 3000 exchanges and 10,000’s of pieces of hardware. By linking these together to get a complete picture of the network, we can understand the customer impact of any failure from port to card, to device to backhaul.
The configuration management database (CMDB) project will bring this data to life and allow improved outage reporting to our Partners, reducing delays caused by manual interrogation.
Implementing good customer experience
Excellent customer experience won’t happen overnight, it’s a journey that will take time to develop.
We’d love to tell you more about our plans to improve customer experience on your account review and get your feedback. Please contact your Account Manager to find out more.
