The customer experience

The telecom industry no longer talks only about customer service — instead, it is addressing the broader topic of the customer experience, which includes not just the conversations between customer service representatives and customers when something goes wrong, but the full range of customer contact from when a service is ordered to when it is delivered.

Service providers of all types are investing heavily in this customer experience. A recent survey, conducted by Frost & Sullivan and commissioned by Amdocs, found that two-thirds of service providers responding expected to increase their spending on customer service enhancements next year.

And increased investment is what will be required, for many reasons. Chief among them is the reality that, as service providers try to offer more services and more complex services, like they are doing today, customer service requirements increase exponentially. It is easier for customers to get confused, there are more things that can break and it is harder for customers to decipher competitive offers and determine what they want.

At the same time, cost control initiatives are driving service providers to create more self-care options to eliminate costly labor wherever possible. One area of intense competition for AT&T and Verizon in recent months has been in adding features to the self-care portals they have created for their valuable business customers. Throughout the industry, there is a movement toward natural speech options for interactive voice response systems, to make them less impersonal as they route calls.

Where people are still involved as CSRs, expectations for their performance have changed significantly. Now, in addition to attending to unhappy and even irate customers — as well as new service requests — CSRs are expected to know a broader range of products and to actively work to upsell the customer when appropriate. Oh, and they have to figure out when that appropriate moment is at hand.

After an era in which customer service seemed to decline, and handling calls quickly and cheaply was the goal, the customer experience is getting a much-needed makeover. And since we are all customers at some time, that can only be good news.