Focus On The Customer Experience

Focusing on the customer experience requires putting the customer at the center of everything you do, adding new dimensions to the old idea of customer-centric management. Focusing on the customer experience means that we have to look at every element and every stage of the customer’s contact with our people, systems, and processes: the retail spaces where they shop, our products and services, the experience with our service reps, and their experience with billing – with every touch point we have with the customer.

• At US West and Telstra we invested several hundred million dollars to establish a fully-staffed Learning Academy to provide formal training for our thousands of technicians. The Learning Academy is a place where customer-facing service staff can hone their technical skills, improve their interpersonal skills, and keep up with new technologies and new product, process, and method innovations.
• At Orange we developed and tested new approaches to retailing, moving from selling devices to market-based management (MBM), a relationship around coaching and training customers, and providing consulting services where we could solve customer’s problems, watch the customer experience around our products and services, and listen to customer needs. The result at Orange was increased growth rates from less than four percent when we introduced MBM to double-digit growth 12 months later.
• At Telstra we designed and deployed state-of-the-art, interactive retail stores where consumers could have a hands-on experience with our products and talk with technology-savvy sales consultants who could help them see new possibilities for changing their lives by using our products and services. The result at Telstra was that sales in our state-of-the-art stores exceeded sales in traditional retail outlets by more than 30 percent.
• At Telstra we deployed a high-speed, nationwide mobile Internet with world-leading network speeds, more reliable service (e.g., fewer dropped calls), more choices in how a mobile phone or personal digital assistant (Smartphone) can be used (including live TV, browsing, as a hot spot), and more choices in how and where the services could be accessed.