A long, long time ago, before you spent most of your waking hours with your eyes glued to various flickering screens, there used to be a kind of offline shopping where you walked into a first-class store, possibly in your neighborhood, where someone behind the register or walking the floor asked how he could help you. Mythological? Maybe.
In this legendary establishment of days gone by, the manager or proprietor knew all her best customers, and knew how to spot prospective patrons, as well. VIP customers were treated as such: you wouldn’t find a premium client waiting long for recognition or extraordinary service. Ordinary customers received helpful attention and pleasant chit-chat, too. The settlement of any transactional dispute was usually handled professionally and politely, and was resolved as directly as possible.
What’s different now?
Well, nothing. Such stores still exist, of course. I took a family member clothing shopping recently and was delighted not just by the owner’s soft-spoken, respectfully attentive manner, but by the fine quality of the products I saw neatly displayed around me. And it didn’t hurt that the glass doors at the back of the shop offered a dream-like view of a lushly green, perfectly manicured garden. A pocket-sized piece of heaven, in fact.
As a service provider, no matter the scale, you want to present that ambience to your customers: five-star quality, devotion to detail, cordial attentiveness, responsive listening and proactive care. RADCOM’s MaveriQ solution provides customer experience data to show you and your customer care reps what your subscriber has been experiencing, and what pain points he or she may have encountered. Service providers want to know about trouble on the line, and, whenever possible, deal with it before the subscriber even notices the slightest deterioration in quality.
Your customers should get the feeling that they matter to you. Most of the time, operators are on top of current issues. But do your subscribers know you know? They might not. It’s important to make sure that they are aware that you have an eye on the situation, and that you’re handling it. RADCOM’s MaveriQ tools can help with that, too.
Customer experience management (CEM) is a fairly recent term, and it involves new ways to manage and provide customer satisfaction. Analytics software built to measure CX (customer experience) qualitatively and quantitatively is quite a leading edge development. Live relationship-building and personal service have not gone away, but they have been replaced in many industries by the concept of personalization. That doesn’t mean pre-digital customer relationship-building has disappeared: it never will. It’s just not done face to face as often.
The goal, no matter how you get there, is to provide the customer with excellent service quality, and leave them with a positive emotional feeling about your products, your services, and your brand. The clichéd and often dusty placard you used to see in stores held a very valuable insight: “If you like us, tell your friends. If you don’t, tell us.” People love to talk, and they love to share experiences. Instead of the four or five friends they could have spoken to years ago, they can and do recount their reactions on social media, where those reactions are shared to many, many users. Comments made by a single individual could reach thousands or millions: service providers recognize that today’s consumer has a much bigger impact on the market in general. You want to make your brand’s story a tale that brings positive revenue flow when it’s retold, but more importantly, one that generates brand loyalty and an outstanding net promotion score (NPS).
As a CSP, you can use CEM analytics to aggregate all customer interactions end-to-end, correlating all touch points into a single unified view, enabling the CSP to create a more fine-tuned personal offering to fit the customer’s needs. By integrating and utilizing the subscriber’s real-life quality of experience, you’re not just putting together a clear and complete picture of your subscriber and what’s important to them. You’re building a true image of your brand, of your service, as a provider that cares enough to know what’s going on. When your subscribers know they matter to you, you’re building satisfaction, loyalty, and a happier face on every one of your customers. That’s priceless.
Sharon hates standing in line, but she hates lingering on hold worse. At the first note of canned music, she’s already gritting her teeth. Sharon’s your subscriber, and like others, she has little patience for wasted time. So when she waited an hour and a half to complain about her poor mobile internet service, she was already fuming before the conversation started. After your rep asked her name five times just to begin a frustrating conversation, with answers based on a phone script, she had really had it. When the rep came up with no solution but a speed test, and advised her to “Go to your nearest service center to replace your SIM,” followed by the support call being dropped, Sharon threw her phone down and decided to switch carriers. That’s easy enough these days. But first, she got on social media and described her disappointment in very angry but humorous terms. Her friends laughed, sympathized, and shared her post. It’s gone viral. Your customer satisfaction rate is sliding, your churn rate is rising, and you just had to cut next year’s budget in half. And they’re still sharing that post. Oops.
Could you have avoided that disaster entirely?
Well, where are your metrics, and what was your method? Did you plan for good service, good support, and good customer experience analysis? In order to provide a positive customer experience, it helps to have a customer experience assurance solution that does the heavy lifting. That’s why RADCOM created the MaveriQ family of analytics and assurance applications.
Let’s think strategically. What’s been missing from your approach, what are your next moves going forward, and how can we help you?
The CX Six
These six customer experience action items may be useful in reminding us of the obvious: take care of your customers, and they’ll take care of you. What are some of the things you do for your subscribers?
Clarify
The service as well as the value you are providing should be transparent:
A. Does the customer understand what they are getting, and why it’s worth it? B. Do you understand what you’re providing, and why?
Connect
Activate your ability to personalize.
Are you asking your customers what they need? Can you tailor your services for their preferences? Do you understand the customer’s local, individual or corporate requirements? Which of the customers’ needs will you anticipate?
Reward
Your customers are your most valuable asset. Some premium subscribers are even more prized. When you know who your VIPs are, you can give them the royal treatment they deserve. To do that, you’ll first need to aggregate and recognize previously provided positive customer data. Then, focus on your VIP traffic, learning more about them, to enable you to offer each of them a superstar level of service.
Troubleshoot
Responsive and quickly implemented issue resolution is vital. Ideally, fix problems before they become noticeable. Let your customer know that you’re taking care of any complaints or glitches, and make sure to actually fix the pain point promptly.
Optimize
You can always do better, and so can your network. Optimize your network before any trouble comes along, and you’ll improve both quality and your customers’ enjoyment of your services. It’s a continual process.
Market
Communicate. With all the information you have gathered about what your customers want and need, you can now convey to them that you are able to provide it. This will satisfy current subscribers, and express to potential new subscribers that you are ready and willing to serve them.
How can you present your customers with the best possible customer experience? Obviously, it takes some thought and some time. But it also helps to have the best tools available. Take a look at some of ours, designed to help you optimize CX and subscriber happiness.
Without getting stuck in the silos of the past, RADCOM’s tools can draw information for big data analytics from data lakes that never fed into a unified solution before. And each facet of the RADCOM toolset, with the information that it gathers, can provide a new view of what you’re currently offering, where it’s most successful, where it falls short, and what your customers need from you. That’s all you need to take your service to new heights.
It takes far more effort and expense to gain new customers than to keep the ones you’ve already got. As with any business, you get what you want by giving the customers what they want. And there’s no reason to give less than your best: when you give more than the subscriber expects to get, you’ll not only avoid churn, you’ll reap the rewards of a well-deserved reputation for excellence.
