CORAL GABLES, Fla.-When it comes to customer service, Barry Winkle aspires to have the role of the lonely Maytag repairman.
Winkle is executive vice president of marketing for Pocket Communications Inc., Washington, D.C., which plans a full-scale commercial launch of it personal communications services network sometime in the second half of this year.
Pocket won licenses in the Federal Communications Commission C-block auction covering a population of 43 million from Detroit to Chicago to Dallas, and in Las Vegas and Hawaii.
“One call does it all” is the startup carrier’s goal, Winkle said in a keynote speech Feb. 10 at a conference entitled, “Deploying Innovative Customer Care Solutions for Strategic Advantage.” The meeting was co-sponsored by the Institute for International Research and Booz-Allen & Hamilton, both in New York.
Booz-Allen is acting as a consultant to Pocket’s design of its new customer care and billing system. For the first time in its 75-year history, Booz-Allen also has made a financial investment in a client-of $5 million, Winkle said.
In its big-picture thinking, Pocket is thinking small and low. Its target market is Everyman, not the high-end user. Rather than a one-size-fits-all service for the average customer, Pocket seeks to offer its customers choices from a menu of optional services that its digital GSM-1900 technology, coupled with an open platform, will allow it to provide as fast as it becomes available from outside vendors. “It’s a mass market, but very individualized,” Winkle said. “In two to three years, you’ll literally see a smorgasbord of services consumers can get, so you better look at your billing now.”
No matter which company provides the particular service, Pocket will do the billing and customer care. Bucking the conventional wisdom, which Winkle said is obsolete, Pocket’s strategy will be to create many, small, decentralized customer care centers throughout its coverage area.
“Big call centers remote from my business have a high turnover rate (for both customers and employees),” Winkle said. “Every city in the United States has unique characteristics. Community-based employment builds goodwill and provides better feedback loops, so customer retention will increase.”
Prior to joining Pocket, Winkle held a variety of positions with MCI Communications Corp., including responsibility for managing several hundred call centers. “We (at Pocket) were very lucky 18 months ago to get to start with a blank sheet of paper,” he said.
“Especially in wireless, customer care has been designed as a business element driven by the network; billing is almost a stand-alone service. Customer service reps know what’s wrong but can’t fix it,” Winkle said. “Our vision is that the enterprise designs the end product into each aspect of the business. Some say that’s very hard to do, but if you don’t do it, you will see the self-destruction of your business.”
In the past six months, Winkle said he has visited about 35 call centers around the country where customer service and billing are handled. Old-style centers, he said, are slow, semi-automated, require customer service representatives to retrieve information about a single customer from several computers and segregate responsibilities among employees.
By contrast, new centers organized around an enterprise model employ information sharing among departments, which can be accessed by customer service representatives on a single computer screen. At the same time, there remains a certain skills hierarchy among employees, even though each one is permitted by new job descriptions and information availability to exercise more flexibility and initiative in dealing with multiple customer requests and complaints.
Artificial intelligence comes into play here in that it automatically routes incoming calls to individual employees based on where they stand in the hierarchy of skills, such as their ability to speak a foreign language. During peak demand periods, artificial intelligence also can outsource automatically the simplest and most routine of customer calls to other call centers that are under contract to handle overflow.
If one call can do it all, every dollar saved on avoided customer call backs starts adding up to millions of dollars in revenues quickly, Winkle said.
Additionally, advanced software gives employees the option to practice interactively with new training models on their computers-a system that is better for knowledge retention than passive, one-time receipt of how-to information, Winkle said.
“We want to get away from the old tradition of a sweat shop. We want not a good looking building but a great looking building, clean with a warm atmosphere and a teamwork design layout,” he said. “Everybody wants to be a success. Given the right tools and incentives, 100 percent of people can do well.”
