VanillaPlus (VP): Does Colt see customer experience management (CEM) as a differentiator?
David Cox (DC): Colt’s vision is to be most customer-oriented company in our industry. Delivering an excellent customer experience is a centre pillar of our strategy; everything else hangs off of that.
VP: What CEM approaches have you taken?
DC: Our CEM is currently focused on two core streams. At a functional level, it’s primarily about understanding pain points in the delivery of services and using direct feedback from the customers to drive continuous improvement and make sure that we deliver against their expectations. But we are also trying to build connections with our customers that go beyond simply meeting expectations. Our intention in the long term is to build a more significant connection with customers – what I like to call an emotional connection. In order to do that, we’re developing activities which build towards the ideal customer experience. This is all about making sure we understand what really matters to our customers and what drives them at a personal and business level – and using that to define in very concrete terms what great customer service actually means.
VP: How do you obtain feedback from your customers?
DC: We have three levels of feedback. One through our day-to-day interactions with customers – whether we’re fixing an incident or delivering a new service.That tells us how we are doing across the customer journey and what pain points customers are experiencing. The second goes beyond the day-to-day. We run a survey amongst customers on a quarterly basis – it used to be annually, but we have increased its frequency – to ask them about their relationship with Colt, so we have timely information about how customers perceive the services they receive from Colt. Thirdly, we’re trying to make sure we capture and use the adhoc information we glean through interactions with our service teams, account managers and sales managers in order to build solid customer relationships.
VP: What does good customer experience mean to Colt customers?
DC: Through extensive customer research, we have identified four principles of great customer service which we intend to apply to everything that we do. The first is about reliability, about being absolutely rock solid, so that we do what we say we’re going to do, everything works the way it’s supposed to and customers can depend on us. On top of that, the second principle is about ownership, about stepping up when it matters to the customer. The third principle is about being open and honest with our customers. It’s important to them that we tell it like it is – we don’t just give them the good news. We strive for open communication both ways, and pay attention both when customers have good and bad things to say about us so that everyone knows exactly where they stand. But at the very top, what pulls all of this together is always seeing things through the eyes of our customers. It’s about empathy and standing shoulder to shoulder with our customers, so that we work in away that delivers against their interests rather than putting ours first. We’re redesigning all of our activity across the customer journey to embody those four principles. We know that if we deliver across all of them we’ll make a connection with our customers and really build trust in Colt as an organisation.
VP: Colt has changed from being a network provider to being a provider of a wider range of technology services to enterprises. With a wider portfolio, has it become more challenging to ensure you deliver great customer experiences?
DC: Obviously, the more complex and diverse your services are the more you have to take into account to develop and deliver great customer experiences. But by keeping to them and working them into everything we do, to a certain extent we can take out the complexity and deliver a seamless experience across our services, which aims to reflect a consistency every time the customer interacts with us.
VP: Do you see CEM as a means to up sell and cross-sell other services to customers?
DC: The reason an organisation does this is to build a connection with the customer so that everything flows and is synchronised. Customers with a sense of loyalty and advocacy to an organisation stay longer and talk positively about it. That helps to create a differentiated experience so existing customers want to do more business with Colt and ultimately it helps to gain new customers as well. As we deliver on those four core principles, we intend to build a sense of trust in Colt among our customers – and trust is the bedrock of business relationships.
VP: To what extent is CEM technology an IT investment priority for you?
DC: From a technology point of view, we focus on two types of investment. One is about gathering information, harnessing the voice of the customer and being able to measure current experience. More importantly, the second is about making sure Colt is harnessing the information and knowledge we have around our customers so that every time we interact with a customer we can really identify what matters to that customer and when.
VP: Within the CEM discipline, how important are multi-channel integration and service personalisation?
DC: We are living in a multi-channel world, so having multi-channel integration is absolutely critical. That said, the work we are putting in to improving the customer experience is not about us driving a multi-channel strategy. It’s about us enabling our customers to interact with us in a way that works for them at any given moment. To a certain extent that is about service personalisation, so that they can work with us the way they want to, rather than us imposing rules. As a business, we are not looking at customer experience as a project we are executing and which will be finished in a year’s time. We are transforming ourselves into a service company with customers at the heart, and that is becoming the way that we operate. Providing a great customer experience is becoming part of our DNA and is increasingly the natural way in which we do business.
