In UK the Ofcom has reported that the Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are underperforming when it comes to customer service. In Sweden, the Swedish Consumer Agency, has also reported bad performance when it comes to CSP customer service. A few common complaints are: difficulty to terminate agreements, hard to get in contact with customer care, they don’t solve reported problems.
All science today states that you should treat your customers well otherwise you face detractors, churn and lower revenues.
I’ll concentrate on the area where Subtonomy are experts in, namely technical customer service. We did a study of a big outage in a mobile network and only 0,3% of affected subscribers called customer service, I would say that CSPs have a serious service debt to their subscribers.
So why do CSPs fail when it comes to technical customer service? This may be the top reasons:
📌 Customer Service is considered a cost center
📌 Underinvestment in tools
📌 Technical customer service is more or less blind, they don’t have proper tools
📌 When OSS/BSS changes are done, it is mainly done to improve operations or reduce cost for the CSP, not to improve for the customer or customer service.
Would it be difficult to change? The answer is no! A few examples;
💥 Digitize more interactions
💥 Anything your staff can do in an internal tool could be exposed to your customers by self-service.
💥 Instead of hiding the telephone number to support make it visible.
💥 Invest in tools so customer service can be on top of things.
Today a majority will not call technical customer support, instead they wait it out or try to solve it themselves. Make technical support available in digital channels for self-service and proactively inform your customers. This will increase customer satisfaction, engagement and build loyalty. We’ve seen a 4 time increase in engagement with technical customer service when enabling technical self-service. This has been done while at the same time reducing cost. Excellent customer service will benefit your customers, staff and shareholders.
Subscriber❤️Autonomy = Subtonomy
Read more: