Building a customer-centric strategy: 3 things CSPs need to do

Let’s begin with a quick question. When you think of a bad customer service experience, what kind of company do you imagine? What example is often heard in conferences illustrating client frustration? You’re right, communications service providers. Why? Because a lot of them lack a true customer-centric strategy.

Communication providers have a huge opportunity in front of them. Can you imagine how successful a CSP would be just by delivering the service level customers expect, instead of what they think customers expect?

The answer is to build a customer-centric strategy to provide a better customer experience. Sounds easy, right? So, what do you need to do?

Stop working in silos

First of all – and it sounds like a cliche – you need to stop working in silos. Sometimes, the Operations area of a CSP is not easy to understand for a person that doesn’t have an engineering background. That’s why most of the marketing efforts we see focus on promoting new service packages, instead of focusing their message on service quality with something like: “Hey, if you come with us, your Internet and phone calls are always going to be the best, no matter the hour, weather or the amount of people calling in your zone”. Personally, if a CSP proves that I’ll never have a dropped call again, they would have me as a client. And, more importantly, as a vocal spokesperson.

Marketing needs to work with Operations to develop a customer-centric strategy. Operations needs to work with Marketing to know what the market wants and improve its service level. Or, in some cases, even to say “We won’t be able to deliver what you are promising, so let’s not hurt our image.”

How much do you know about your service in real-time?

Do you know how many of your customers are experiencing decreased connection speeds right now? Or where these are? You need to be able to measure everything in order to face the new issues and improve service delivery. Even if it is outside of the scope of your network.

This is not only Operations’ responsibility. It involves Communications, Marketing, Client Service, Product, etc. Many analysts have stated that data-driven businesses have significant advantages in today’s marketplace. To be at the forefront of the industry, you need to have the right analytics tools and make the data available to anyone that needs it within your organization.

Solve your problems before they impact your clients

I guarantee churn will decrease. It’s more expensive to get a new customer than to retain one (4 to 10 times, according to some analysts). This is particularly true for communications service providers if you take into account how easy it is to change carriers and how minimal the differentiation between companies is – they all offer pretty much the same things. The best differentiator you can ever hope for is providing better service than your competition. That would really drive revenue.

According to the internationally recognized customer experience guru, John Goodman, a bad experience generates from 2 to 4 times more word-of-mouth marketing than a positive experience. This means a higher risk of losing customers.

If your plan is to keep your current customer happy and gain new customers, the best strategy you can ever employ is to fix the root cause of your clients’ issues. Of course, it’s important to have a helpful support team, great customer service representatives and attractive bundles, but if you want to succeed, you’ll need to implement a customer-centric strategy that will help you prevent customer complaints and deliver competitive services.