Are CSPs Truly Customer-Centric?

If you ask any company today if they care about their customers, they all say, “Yes.” If you dig a little further and continue asking questions such as, “Are you a customer-centric company?” they would probably say yes as well. After all, the concept of customer centricity has been around for more than 50 years.

A study conducted by the CMO Council showed that approximately half of all companies state that they’re extremely customer-centric. But, when the customers of those companies were asked the same question, only a tenth of them agreed with the companies. Today, things are not much different in that regards. Why does this gap exist?

I’m convinced that communication service providers truly believe they are customer centric, but reality shows that it is not the case – as the study’s results reflected. The problem resides in what is understood as being customer-centric. For instance, conducting satisfaction surveys after the customer calls for a problem and to make the time customers spend while being in the hands of customer support more “tolerable” (you can’t expect customers to be excited to call you for a problem) doesn’t mean that the company is customer-centric.

What Does it Mean to be Customer-Centric?

As Peter Fader, Wharton marketing professor and co-director of The Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, states in his book Customer Centricity: Being customer-centric is a mindset change. It is a holistic view that places the customer in the center. The ability to understand customers at a fairly granular level. To be able to identify the customers or the segments of customers who are valuable from the ones who aren’t. To provide good service and develop new products and services with a special focus on valuable customers’ needs.

A product-centric company lives and dies with their products. They are focused on bringing new products to the market and not checking to see what the customers’ unmet needs are. They are not checking in to see if customers’ needs have changed or shifted since the product or service was conceived. And if, consequently, the product or service should have evolved to meet those new needs.

An example of a customer-centric misconception are companies that only conduct quality surveys after providing support, but lose the whole the customer-centric focus when marketing is pushing a campaign. What about tracking customers’ interaction with the telemarketing team? For example, instead of blasting calls over and over offering extra channels or premium packages, they start listening to what the customers are telling them they care about? How about measuring what the user is consuming – what content, for how long – and offer better resources to enrich their experience?

Customers have problems. They have needs and wants. If CSPs are only thinking about products or services, they are missing the big picture. Perhaps their products or services satisfy customers’ basic needs; however, if CSPs scratch the surface, disruptive ideas may pop up. And they will be able to offer better solutions.

This is not new – it’s been around for a while. But, why are CSPs paying attention now? Because the Internet and OTT on-net players (Facebook, WhatsApp, Netflix, Amazon, etc.) empowered customers. Operators are becoming a mere commodity – all the value is given to these new players. Third-party OTT players are surely listening to their customers and adapting their offerings.

The Breakthrough in Customer-Centricity

So if customers’ voices are important and surveys after calls are not enough – what then? If CSPs are going to be customer-centric, they should at least start measuring customer satisfaction using the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Net Promoter Score is a customer loyalty metric developed by Fred Reichheld, Bain & Company, and Satmetrix that is calculated based on responses to a single question: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague? The scoring for this answer is most often based on a 0 to 10 scale. NPS should also be applied to all stakeholders, including employees.

But, should CSPs stop there? Of course not. We are just at the tip of the iceberg. What’s the next step? Knowing what the customer likes and how they perceive the service without asking them! That is really a breakthrough in customer-centricity.

CSPs need to redefine themselves to survive. Like it or not, our lives are centered aorund digital content and CSPs are the foundation for that to happen. Every experience – good or bad – in the digital world is delivered over CSP’s services.

Let’s say you are streaming a movie and the movie freezes. You will blame the streaming source, but also the Internet service provider (ISP). If the problem were 100% a streaming source issue, that experience will still damage the ISP’s image. And since the CSP is probably just looking at network stats, the provider does not know what is going on.

CSPs need to know what is happening with their customers’ experience and how they – and their influence circle – perceive the quality of their services. Even though knowing everything is not feasible, something that is happening is that the same customer is using different channels to reach the company, exposing issues that were previously managed privately on social channels and influencing other customers’ perception of the company.

CSPs need to use an omnichannel strategy to listen to all the sources of communication with the company, and map them to the correct customers or segments. For example, if a group of customers from an area are complaining through Twitter about the service quality in that area, a call from that area will probably be regarding that same topic and the contact center assistant can be prepared to deal with that beforehand.

This is gaining momentum. Intraway and organizations such as TM Forum have ongoing initiatives centered on customer centricity (you can check their best practices here).

So, what are you doing to become customer-centric?