Q&A: Overcoming silos key to improving mobile customer experience

Connected Planet tracked down Glenn Pingul, vice president of products and mobile strategies for back-office solutions vendor Globys, who jumped the fence from telco to vendor. With a career in Airtouch, T-Mobile and Amex, Glenn is in a good position to focus the spotlight the challenges facing operators as they aim to leverage BSS/OSS assets to improve the customer experience.

Connected Planet: Glenn, is this silo culture in telcos as big and as big a barrier as we are led to believe?

Glenn Pingul: Definitely. The history is that telcos and other industries were simply not built around the customer they were built around technology – and so the silos grew out of power building and cultural divides between technology people, marketing people and management people.

Connected Planet: So, the reason for the current situation is that each of these departments has different goals, timeframes to achieve them and different perspectives on a problem?

Glenn Pingul: Absolutely. What you find is that metrics are misaligned and they are seldom aligned on the customer. For instance I think a lot of your readers will recognize the situation when I say that metrics for customer service tend to be based around throughput and speed of answer. At Amex they went one further and added metrics on how the call turned out and that made a huge difference in complaint handling terms.

Connected Planet: I remember one telco introducing a metric on how many calls could be answered per hour. The CSRs, whose goal was frankly whether they could get to the bar five minutes after clocking off, began taking a call and hanging up immediately. For a while, they were in line for employee of the month.

Glenn Pingul: Good example. I found similar things at T-Mobile. We were considered to have the worst network back then and JD Powers did not look well upon us in their customer satisfaction surveys. My starting point there – I was brought in under marketing to look at customer retention – was that a network that worked, billing that was accurate and the right rate plan were table stakes. If we didn’t get them right, no amount of being nice was going to get customers back.

The other thing I found, and I think this is pervasive, is that goals and metrics are all financial ones. Even churn, if you think about it, is a financial metric. You look at your ‘net adds’ and subtract your ‘net losses’ and come up with a churn figure that you took to the market. Even management was not above increasing power to the marketing machine to increase ‘net adds’ so that the figures looked better. No-one seemed to ‘get’ that really useful metrics must be about the customer. It is beginning to change, though, finally.

Connected Planet: Did your experience at Amex teach you anything that you could use?

Glenn Pingul: It certainly did. We had a situation at Amex, a well known one, where we charged our merchants more than other cards. We found that even if our decal was in the window of a store, the owner or manager would recommend another card to the customer. We were hurting.

Connected Planet: So what did you do?

Glenn Pingul: We went to work. We figured out that the solution would come from Amex cardholders having a higher value than other cardholders. So we designed a real community feel to our campaigns, a club-like exclusivity. We also asked our customers to help – if they came across a store with an Amex sticker on the window and the store owner recommending another card they would tell us and we would act.

Connected Planet: So what was the outcome?

Glenn Pingul: We clawed back. After all, membership has its privileges.

Connected Planet: So back to the original question – what would you tell a telco to do to start flattening out the organization?

Glenn Pingul: First – back to metrics. Make sure that all metrics are tied to a common goal. That goal is customer satisfaction. Here’s another real example – there will normally be a metric in your company around dropped calls. I would bet that right now it says something like ‘dropped calls per cell site.’ Job one is to change that to ‘dropped calls per customer.’ It is meaningless to a customer that 50 calls were dropped in his cell site. It is really meaningful if 12 of them were his.

For me, there are four pillars to customer focus, which are generally misunderstood. When thinking about customers, companies must think about intent, behavior, attitude and experience. The other thing is not to be afraid of talking to customers. When I was with Amex I used to get calls routed to me if a customer demanded to speak to management. I only fielded about five calls per month and I had to recompense very, very few of them. All those callers wanted was to let someone in management know we had a problem, find someone who would listen and vent a little. That’s all.

Connected Planet: What other advice would you give?

Glenn Pingul: Well, one misconception among telcos is about customer care. To me, customer care is when you screw up and need to fix it, customer service is what you should do day in, day out. Telcos have a real advantage by the way. They have so much data and, critically, they have a lot of social data. They know who and how people connect with other people. Very few industries have that.

Apologies, I am over-running, but I get passionate about this stuff. Let me just give you a great example in the telco space. Sprint was doing badly a few years ago. Enter Dan Hesse who made a real difference. He did it by aligning everybody’s goals around the customer experience and compensated everyone in the company on that basis. Now they get number one in customer satisfaction ratings – and the iPhone.

So, my two rules. One, align goals – the big ones first and then the smaller, detailed ones. Rule two, don’t behave like a drunk at a party.

Connected Planet: Glenn, you are going to have to expand on that one.

Glenn Pingul:A man goes to a party and has two glasses of wine. He is basically OK to drive but the police are extra vigilant and so he concentrates too hard. He over-compensates because his knuckles are white and he is tense. He ends up swerving more than we would normally. A policeman would spot it a mile away. What I mean is that telcos – and others – over compensate. They say ‘right we must take real good care of our customers’ and they offer someone who calls in a free handset and 500 free minutes. All that customer needed was a new antenna delivered the next day and he would have been more than happy. It is important, it is essential, to listen to your customers and act naturally with them.

Connected Planet: Thank you, any final thoughts?

Glenn Pingul: It has been a pleasure. Final thoughts? One perhaps – a goal, if you will. At the moment telcos produce customer campaigns in ‘batch’ mode. They segment customers in great chunks and assume that all 25-30 year olds in a certain income bracket think and act the same. The trend must now be towards individual offerings. The good thing is that I do believe we are getting there