A Holistic View of Customers

In the customer-care environment, wireless carriers are seeking a holistic picture of their customers to combat churn and retain high-value customers. In order to get that holistic view, you must understand the meaning of convergence, said Al Rogers, a Logica consultant in the customer-care and billing international business unit. Most people think of convergence as a single bill, he said, but the word really centers on customer care. If you offer multiple services, a subscriber should be able to call you at one phone number and talk to one customer service representative (CSR) about a wireless account, Internet access or any other service you offer. That kind of convergent customer care is attainable even if your services are on more than one bill.

"Convergence is how you look at the customer and how the customer looks back at you," Rogers said. "That means a holistic view of customers so when they call in, they perceive they are being treated as a convergent customer, even though you may issue two bills to them."

Jim Driscoll, EDS wireless division vice president, agreed that when the industry talks about convergence, it generally uses the term "billing," which implies invoicing and receivables. To Driscoll, it refers to how you manage the relationship with your customer throughout his whole life cycle. It includes products you sell to your customer and how you acquire, activate and service him.

Cellular South took a holistic approach in April 1997 using Saville Systems' convergent billing platform when it branched out into local and long-distance service as well as Internet access in some markets, said Katrina Castilaw, Cellular South software analyst. When customers call in, they go through a voice-response unit that gives them basic account information and some cellular-usage-pattern information. If the customer chooses to speak to a CSR, the representative who answers the call is trained on all of Cellular South's services. The carrier does not route calls to specialized groups because if a customer calls concerning one service, he usually will ask a question about another service later on. Castilaw said the company did not want customers to think they were not prepared to answer all questions.

"The customer does not want to deal with talking to several different people during one call. That is what they are trying to get away from," she said. "You have to view the customer from a convergent standpoint and be able to address all their issues."

But how does one get that view? Half of it involves technical changes to your customer database, such as cleaning up your data warehouse and linking accounts within the same household. The rest requires a change in business processes. CSRs who have worked in one area of your business need to learn how to answer questions about all of your services. They also must find out as much as they can about a customer every time they talk with him.

A Holistic Database Whether you are merging with another company or simply combining the customer profiles from separate service offerings, getting one comprehensive customer-care database is an important step. For instance, your wireless business may know someone as A. Rogers, but the same person is entered in your wireline database as Al Rogers and in your Internet database as Allan.

"There is no way for that company to know that I am the same person," Rogers said, "so that company does not know when I call in about a new wireline product that I already have a number of products on the wireless side."

If the various companies that merge or form partnerships have different data formats for their separate customer-care databases, you can find extraction and transformation tools and software to help you clean up the data. Some carriers are building their own in-house products that aid them in com bining incompatible databases.

"During the planning and design of a mitigation project involving data in different billing systems, the objective will be to look for relationships among the data," said Ben Bennett, Logica vice president of billing and customer care. "Once you establish that Al Rogers has a wireline account, the data can then be rationalized to provide a convergent entity. When you pull up the information later, you will see him as one entity with two attributes, wireless and wireline service."

What's more, other members of the same household may subscribe to your services under other first names. Cellular South links accounts within the same household to allow the customer-care and marketing departments to have a better idea of the family's use. Castilaw pointed out that the same theory can apply to businesses, so Cellular South links any accounts that have the same landline address. Saville's platform allows Cellular South CSRs to pull up a customer by name, social security number, account number or phone number. Once the customer is shown on the screen, information about all of his accounts is in front of the representative.

Building the Profile Debra Sventek, Magtech Services consultant, said if you become confused about duplicate last names and addresses, you should call the customer to straighten out the information. That phone call helps you build a holistic customer profile because it will get the customer talking to you.

Sventek herself has two teenagers, so she has two phone lines through a local carrier. She chose a different long-distance company so she can link frequent flyer miles. She also has three separate wireless phones, Internet access and two pagers. Only the long distance and Internet are bundled services; all others are separate accounts.

"There are only four family members, so why do I have all this stuff?" she said. "And, most importantly, why doesn't one carrier know about all this stuff? Because none of it is bundled and because they aren't asking me the right questions."

Linking accounts is not an easy process, Sventek said. It takes time to make phone calls and input information, but it will be time well spent if you can get a total view of the family.

"Even if it takes 10 minutes per customer to clean it up, what is 10 minutes?" she said.

Well, some may argue that 10 minutes is a great deal of time when you are paying CSRs to handle complaints and questions. They don't have time to take on more responsibilities. But Sventek pointed out that relationships built from those calls will come back to you tenfold. You not only are cleaning up your database, but also you are getting your foot in the door to start a conversation. By the time you hang up, you may know that one family has a teenager who will be driving soon and is interested in a wireless phone for her. Or the family may not know you offer Internet access, which it wants.

C. Hunt Eggleston, Technology Trends president, said every time you touch a customer, you should try to learn something new about him. If you use that information to build a relationship with him, you give him a reason not to churn.

Eggleston recommended that after you have taken care of a customer's question or concern, you should ask him two questions about his lifestyle. For example, one month you could ask how often he takes clothes to the dry cleaners and how often he and his family dine out. The next month you could ask how many dinner parties he throws a year, or if he drinks wine. Or, you could list five hobbies and inquire if his family engages in any of them. True, they have nothing to do with phone service, but it will be useful information down the road in building loyalty programs.

If you are still skeptical about using your CSRs' time to chat with your customers, you can achieve the same effect through questionnaires in the billing statement, a warranty card, surveys at the point of sale, or buying information from companies that collect demographics. John Hart, Saville Systems vice president of marketing, noted that some towns take a census every year and sell the results with the residents' names deleted. But you still can learn the buying habits of those people if you are a savvy researcher.

"If you combine that information with the post office database and the database from the phone company, you can get a 99% accurate hit for everyone," he said. "You will have very anchored demographics."

Driscoll added that another way to avoid annoying your customers with questions or taking up the time of your CSRs is to build a web-based order-management system. As customers set up service via the Internet, they can create their own profiles, making market research a simpler process for you.

Using the Information Rogers said a number of customer-care opportunities become available once you have a clean, information-rich database. A holistic approach could give you a competitive edge because almost everyone agreed the wireless industry is about two years away from grasping the concept. Eggleston said one way you could use the information is by surprising and delighting customers in household-specific meaningful ways. For instance, if a customer spends a great deal of money each month at the dry cleaners, you can send him a coupon for $5 or $10 off at a local dry cleaner.

"Restaurants and dry cleaners are very interested in doing this because you are driving traffic to their location," he said. "So this is a very low-cost way of saying 'thank you' to your customers."

One way to set up a program is to choose five dry cleaners in a city and analyze the zip codes within a 5-mile radius. Through a simple billing query, you can find out which customers in those zip codes have spent more than $200 with you that quarter. You can use the customers' addresses to ensure that you send a coupon for a nearby dry cleaner as opposed to one 15 miles away.

Rogers said linking household accounts could save you from embarrassing situations, too. A wireless account may be in a woman's name, but several other wireless and wireline accounts that she uses could be in her husband's name. A company that does not link the accounts may look at the man as a more valued customer than his wife because it looks like he is spending much more money. If you upset her with poor treatment, you will lose more than $20 a month for one phone line when she cancels all the family's accounts with you.

"A valued customer is not just someone who spends a few bucks a month; you need to look at it from a couple vantage points," Rogers said. "You should be able to look at that family of customers as a way to keep a sharp eye on who your valued customers are."

The glue to convergence, he said, is the CSR interface with customers. In order to succeed, you must ensure that your company structures these positions as jobs to which employees aspire, not jobs from which they wish to transfer.

Leading the Pack So how do you compare to other carriers in terms of converged customer care? Driscoll said new entrants have an edge on the incumbent competition because they have an opportunity to define how they want to serve customers without having to support existing processes.

"Those folks are taking a holistic view from the start in terms of managing from the initial sale to ongoing service and billing," he said.

Mid-size carriers may have certain capabilities, but they might have all the features and functions needed to offer converged customer care. Those carriers are looking for third parties to help them with billing, database marketing, data mining, telemarketing support and customer service. Larger carriers are putting a number of programs in place themselves to get the total picture, and they are turning to vendors for specific solutions to round out everything across the entire enterprise.

"Start-up companies clearly have the advantage," Rogers agreed. "They are coming in with new architecture and new technology, and the incumbents who are expanding or going through mergers and acquisitions are going tohave more difficulties in that area."

But he and Bennett cautioned that companies must embrace a convergent culture to mitigate the barriers of silo mentality that manifest themselves when trying to bring together different businesses, business practices and people. If the employees don't think about convergence, the effort will fail.

Wherever you fit in, viewing the services of one customer or an entire family or business is not as difficult as you think. As you link accounts and build your database, many ways emerge for you to thank loyal customers or market new services to them. It can't hurt to have a competitive edge like that.

Last month, Pittiglio Rabin Todd & McGrath (PRTM) released results of a benchmark study. Benchmarking your customer-service operation allows you to establish a baseline of performance that you can use to determine your overall customer-service strategy. It also allows you to compare your company's performance against your competitors to determine your relative strengths and weaknesses.

PRTM's study showed how companies in four different industries ranked the importance of customer service at their companies. Seventy percent of wireless companies ranked customer service an eight or higher on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the highest.

Data also showed that the median wireless company spends $9 per mediated incident, while "best-in-class" wireless companies spend only $3 per mediated incident. The term mediated is used to describe incidents in which a human assists the customer and does not include incidents that are resolved via a voice-response system or information obtained through a web page. There is a huge gap between best-in-class companies and median companies.

Most executives would agree that centralized call centers provide lower costs but worry that they may affect service quality negatively and therefore customer satisfaction. PRTM's benchmark data, however, shows that customer satisfaction is actually higher for companies that have centralized call centers. (See Figure 1.)

The company believes this result occurs because centralized call centers can offer more uniform service, better information dissemination and knowledge sharing that is more difficult with decentralized centers.

Another question is whether universal reps are more or less effective than specialized representatives. Many of the companies that participated in the study are organized so that all incoming inquiries are handled by any customer service representative whether the inquiry is related to activation, features or billing. Other companies have a call distributor (human or automated) as the front line that distributes calls to specialists who have detailed knowledge in one particular area. The study shows that universal representatives result in higher productivity, lower costs per incident, and higher first-contact resolution rates.

The ability to resolve a customer issue with a single contact point is key to achieving high customer-satisfaction ratings. But what first-contact resolution rate is average for a wireless company? Or best-in-class? The benchmark data shows that the industry is effective at resolving issues on first contact. The median wireless company resolved 83% of all incidents with one contact, while best-in-class companies are approximately 10% better.