Customer experience: The power of prioritization

The saying goes, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” And in some cases, so is the road to hellish customer experience. In a survey by Bloomberg, 92 percent of telco executives said that customer experience is a top strategic objective for them. And yet, an Ipsos poll in February 2015 found that telcos rank as the second worst industry for customer service – only slightly behind government offices. Most companies have no shortage of great ideas – but in some ways they could actually be trying too hard, trying out too many initiatives at once and spreading resources thin. At TM Forum Live! Asia, in Singapore, Eugene Yeo, CIO, MyRepublic, talked about the power of prioritization – maximizing resources to get the best result for the customer. This is part of MyRepublic’s “Getting to awesome” roadmap: Using this approach the company has improved its customer experience seven-fold over four months.

• Instil the customer-centric culture
• Gather ideas
• Prioritize the list
• Make the changes
• Keep improving

Yeo said, “Prioritization of customer experience initiatives is important for the effective deployment of resources to deliver the maximum value to your customers.”

My Republic takes a pragmatic and structured approach to getting the job done and uses a Customer Experience Prioritization Model – a visual approach to identifying which key customer experience initiatives to prioritize. This starts with three key parameters – impact, effort and experience. Each initiative is ranked on a scale of 1 and 10 and displayed visually. These scores are then transferred to a scoring table. This is then mapped visually to a matrix. This is an example. Then you can prioritize. Yeo recommended: Other factors to consider when prioritizing include the effort needed to carry out the initiative and the impact on the customer base, Yeo said. Watch this back-stage interview with Eugene Yeo.

• Impact: The number of customers the initiative will affect
• Effort: Cost involved in the successful execution of the initiative
• Experience: The emotional impact on customers – taking into consideration the potential to anger them if the initiative isn’t embarked on and the potential to delight them if it is.
• Start with the fundamentals (those in the bottom right of the quadrant) – things that you have to get right.
• Move on to the outliers (those in the top right of the quadrant) – these are the things that probably will happen according to Murphy’s Law [that things will go wrong] and when they do, you don’t want to anger your customers.
• Then look at the ‘good to haves’ (those in the top left) – these are things people don’t necessarily expect, but are probably delighted to have.
• Finally, look at the cost savings (those in the bottom left) – cost savings are often a major driver for customer experience programs, but they should not be the primary driver, as they can also “walk in the opposite direction”, Yeo warned, making it hard to truly prioritize the customer.

• MyRepublic has a history of making great improvements to customer service – see the Case study on how MyRepublic’s 1Gbps fiber service led to omnichannel, zero-touch process automation