By Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Ph.D. - telecomasia.net
The e-social revolution has brought an unprecedented level of transparency into all aspects of our lives, from personal friendships to business dealings, driving everyone’s expectations higher.
As a result, many common business practices today are becoming ‘worst practices’. And even though they don’t actually lie or steal, the fact is that telecom companies still generate substantial profits simply by fooling customers, or by taking advantage of their lack of knowledge, or by capitalizing on their mistakes.
In tomorrow’s hyperconnected, hyper-transparent world, however, companies will be expected to beextremely trustable. They will be expected to proactively work to protect a customer’s own interests. It has always been the case that making a profit from a customer’s error might (if the customer eventually found out) jeopardize a firm’s relationship with that individual customer.
Tomorrow’s untrustable behavior will be much more widely publicized, arousing the righteous indignation of customers who aren’t involved, but who will take satisfaction in ‘punishing’ a firm by spreading the news of their bad deeds and withholding their own patronage. As a result, simple trustability will soon become one of the most important basic ingredients of acceptable customer service in every business category, including telecom.
In the e-social future, a company will only be able to succeed, competitively, if it enjoys the extreme trust of each customer in the same way a friend enjoys the extreme trust of another friend.
Unfortunately, telecom companies are in danger of becoming case studies in untrustable behavior. If telecom companies don’t begin changing their policies soon, in fact, they are destined to become the ‘used car salesmen’ of the future, infamous for their sneaky ways and untrustable behaviors and parodied by the next generation of entertainers and comedians.
Due to pricing complexity, rapid technological change, and the increasing diversity of services offered, today’s telecom companies are ideally positioned to make money through consumer error or lack of information, and many of them gleefully do so.
In the U.S., for instance, the New York Times recently exposed an operator for coaching its call center reps on how to avoid giving legitimate refunds to customers.
When people called in to complain about unanticipated charges for data access, reps were instructed not to inform customers about how to block these types of accidental calls unless a customer specifically asked how to do so.
It may be an extreme case, but this sort of policy epitomizes the dilemma that most telecom companies face: Proactively protecting customers from their own errors costs money, requiring a firm to be willing to sacrifice some current profits.
The sheer complexity of telecom offerings today virtually ensures that consumers will in fact make many such mistakes.
So what will a genuinely trustable telecom company really look like? What will it do differently?
For one thing, a genuinely trustable operator will automatically assign customers to the most economic calling plans based on their calling, texting and data usage. A ‘best practice’ will
be to retroactively assign the most economic calling plan for each customer, crediting the customer with a rebate where appropriate.
Very few operators today do this, of course, and those that do often use it as an excuse to extend a postpaid contract.
If a customer is about to subscribe to a mobile or landline service from a home or business address that is prone to poor network coverage or slow broadband connectivity, a genuinely trustable telecom company will advise them in advance of this weakness in their offering, perhaps providing a discount or other benefit until such time as service in their home area is improved.
A genuinely trustable telecom operator will almost certainly have an unconditional money-back guarantee available to cover any and all customer complaints. In the same way today’s best online merchants offer unconditional refunds, tomorrow’s operators will use such a
policy to ensure that customers always receive the service they expect.
Trustable behavior like this is very difficult for any company to embrace, because it flies directly in the face of most firms’ deepest instincts to ‘keep the cash’ and maximize their short-term profits.
Acting in the customer’s interest requires a firm to be willing to forego immediate profits in return for earning the longer-term respect and confidence of its customers.
As telecom companies must become more trustable, because the rising power of customers exposes untrustable behavior, the question of a company’s trustability will go to the heart of its value proposition. Trustability will become an essential element of any company’s customer service in the future in much the same way that having a website has become an essential element of customer service.
To survive in this new, hyper-transparent world in which extreme trust is a prerequisite for business success, a telecom operator must pursue four basic courses of action:
Reciprocity. Having empathy for customers, and treating each one the way you yourself would want to be treated if you were that customer, is the single most important element of trustability. To be trustable, you have to adopt a customer-centric philosophy, and then re-engineer your value proposition and customer experience from the standpoint of the customer.
This will have consequences for your operating policies, of course, but the eventual implications for your firm’s culture will be even more profound. The reason the operator’s underhanded antirefund policies were exposed in the New York Times in the first place is that an employee contacted a reporter. In the end, your telecom employees are customers, too, and if your own workers don’t believe you are a trustable company, then your customers won’t either.
Giving up some control. To make your command-andcontrol, hierarchical firm more trustable you will have to give more authority to individual employees. You need resilience, but well-controlled hierarchies can be rigid and brittle. Think about how to decentralize.
Empower employees to ‘sense and respond’, in real time, to customer issues. This is yet another reason to pay close attention to the culture at your firm, and the unwritten rules that govern how employees really get things done.
While you’re at it, you should also recognize that things will never be perfect, so be prepared in advance for the mistakes. Even if your policies are extremely trustable you’re still going to get ambushed occasionally by rogue customer comments.
Don’t be too afraid to allow your workers to show your company’s human side, including its vulnerability. Brand statements and press releases are perfect, but vulnerability will encourage customers to be empathetic to you, and empathy generates trust.
Community. One of the secrets behind the e-social revolution is that people have an irresistible urge to share with others. They make their opinions known, they contribute ideas, they collaborate on things such as Wikipedia and open source software, and many companies even find that customers provide the best kind of customer service for other customers.
If you want to become more trustable you have to tap this sharing instinct, first by sharing your own honest counsel with customers. Talk to them not just in terms of how they can get more value from their service, but how they can better connect with friends, how they can find things out faster, manage their connections more efficiently, and live their own lives more fully.
It’s ironic that telecom play such a vital role in connecting people and releasing their sharing impulses, but service providers themselves don’t have much to say on the subject.
Competence. There are two requirements for being trustable. Not only must your intent be to act in the customer’s interest (reciprocity), but you have to have the competence to act on that intent, as well. On a basic level this means paying close attention to the quality of your product and service. But just as important, you should upgrade your data, analytics, and systems.
Quantifying the financial benefits of long-term customer trust and confidence requires good analytics. Customer lifetime values are not easy to compute, but in the communications industry, more than in most other categories, the statistical data is clearly available and there is no shortage of analytical tools to make these calculations. If you want your telecom company to become more trustable, you’ll have to begin paying attention to the data and pushing the envelope on analysis.
What kinds of events tend to move customer lifetime values higher or lower? What customer interactions, or ‘moments of truth’, are more likely to drive perceptions of trustability? And which of your customers are more trustable (and valuable) themselves?
The bottom line: in a world of extreme trust you always have to take a step back from whatever business policy you’re considering, whatever new idea you’re thinking about, and ask yourself: “If this became public, would it be an embarrassment to us? Would we be proud of it? Would some of our customers hold it against us?” There’s a very good chance that whatever you do will become public. If you want your telecoms company to be genuinely trustable, then you have to have clean hands, not just a good alibi.
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