I’m in awe of the people who supply communications services but sometimes your technical genius makes you over complicate things. Legend has it that NASA spent millions of dollars trying to develop a pen that would work in space. Whereas the Russians just used a pencil.
On another occasion, I saw an Innovation Conference lecturer run endless complicated online queries, in order to track down his lost iPhone. Meanwhile, his assistant asked at the café if anyone had handed in a phone. Guess who was more effective.
Sadly, this tendency for over complication is endemic. By the same logic, are we missing some obvious tricks in monitoring customer experience?
If you want to find out what customers think of their mobile service provider, there are much simpler and arguably more effective ways than ploughing through big data. Are you convinced by the revelations that come from machines? I’m not. It can only really work if people know the right questions to ask. I’m not sure data scientists are asking the right questions, because they are not the same types of people as the subscribers.
Surely, there are simpler ways of getting closer to the users. As a bonus, the people doing the research could wangle a free season ticket to their favourite entertainment arena.
To get an idea of how well the major communications service providers (CSPs) perform, we need to see them competing with each other in sports, music and dance. Every Saturday, there are bouts between the major suppliers held in public, at venues up and down the country. The public, it seems, all turn up to see which CSP is performing the best. They say they are football fans, but most of them seem to ignore the live drama unfolding in front of them. Instead, they spend the whole 90 minutes trying to capture stills and video clips and load them onto YouTube, Vine, Vimeo and every other social media platform.
Call me old fashioned, but I prefer to watch the game, although I seem to be in the minority. There’s a growing portion of the population that only enjoys public events through the prism of a glowing screen. The same applies for all kinds of entertainment. Everyone seems more interested in filming their heroes and publishing the results, than simply watching the spectacle for themselves.
This madness can be useful however, as it gives CSPs great insight into their customers.
Take football as an example. After a game, in the pubs around the around, on football club web sites and on social media, the fans will debate how the competition went. “I think O2 has got to be disappointed with that performance,” Fan A will say, “to say it lacked pace is an understatement.” Fan B, who’d been trying (unsuccessfully) to load a funny video of a weird looking away fan, will agree. “I think O2 needs to go into the market. I just couldn’t hit the net.”
Vodafone is great in London, its fans might argue, but away from home – in some of the more remote corners of the country – Vodafone’s signal can go missing. There’s an uncomplimentary song about Everything Everywhere and you really don’t want to know how the 3 chant goes.
Suffice it to say, every week, there are mass social gatherings – at concert halls, sport grounds, political rallies, and the occasional riot – and the performance of mobile technology comes under intense scrutiny. This is where people get to benchmark how well the mobile players are performing. If a fan can’t load their video of a controversial incident, and their neighbor can, the first question they will ask is which service they are using. The next question will be about how much it costs and how much the mobile operator charges for a season ticket. OK, there’s no evidence at all to back this contention up – not yet anyway – but millions of crunch mobile contract buying decisions are made on a Saturday afternoon.
Customer experience management is a team game so many group activities and team sports might give the CSPs a few insights into CEM. It’s got to be a lot cheaper, safer and nicer than going down a data mine
