They say “communications is a close-knit industry” and I think that’s a pretty accurate description after taking the 08.40 FGC train from Plaça d’Espanya to the Fira Gran Via – temporary home to the massive Mobile World Congress conference. Fortunately for me, impersonating a tinned sardine for 15 minutes every day was the only less-than-pleasant moment in an otherwise excellent customer experience in Barcelona, Spain, earlier this month.
And customer experience was very much the main course on the menu at the CMO lunch hosted by European Communications and Amdocs at MWC, where senior marketing executives, including service provider CMOs from Europe and Asia, had the opportunity to discuss top-level findings from recent Amdocs global research conducted with both service providers and consumers.
It’s now a multidimensional customer experience
The assembled marketers heard how 88% of their industry peers felt it important to offer Generation Y consumers a more advanced customer experience. The sources of poor customer experience were found to be multidimensional, ranging from under-par call center interaction, which was mentioned by 64% of the industry survey respondents, network issues (44%), bill shock (27%) and poor store experience (20%).
But there was good news on the consumer side as 63% of the 8,000-plus subscribers responding from 17 countries worldwide said they recommend their current service providers and 89% cited the customer care/experience they receive as the reason behind their endorsements.
Two major points emerged from the peer-to-peer discussion that followed:
Net promoter score isn’t enough
First, measuring the quality of customer experience has also become multidimensional. On its own, net promoter score is no longer sufficient to understand the perceived quality of the journey that customers experienced. NPS was felt to be open to manipulation by some channels to boost the results and therefore the remuneration.
In addition to NPS, our attendees shared their experience of deploying a range of tools – from mystery shopping to lifetime value modeling and to operational dashboard – to really grasp the current and predicted quality of experience.
The CMO has to own the customer experience
Second, the CMO has to be in the driver’s seat when it comes to the design, execution and continuous improvement of a differentiated customer experience. As one of our panelists put it:
“The best way to make customer experience a true source of sustainable competitive advantage is by branding it … it then becomes impossible to imitate.”
Indeed, 52% of consumers gave brand reputation as the reason they recommend their service provider.
With the CMO being the voice of the customer inside the organization and the guardian of the brand, our panel concurred with the view that marketing has to own and drive customer experience.
To succeed in this endeavor, the CMO has to build a web of allies and integrate the many functional silos of the service provider as well as external partners, equipping each with the vision and the tools pertinent to their respective roles – just like GSMA works with the FGC, the municipality of Barcelona, and many others to make MWC such a smooth event year after year – they might want to make those train carriages a little bigger though.
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