It is much more expensive to recapture a wireless customer who has churned than it is to keep a customer on your network, say some customer service experts. Providing good customer service not only keeps customers happy, but it also is becoming a differentiator in an increasingly crowded wireless market.
“The hot-button last year and continuing this year was for carriers to offer convergent services,” said John Hart, vice president of marketing at Saville Systems, which provides customer care services. “At the same time, as more and more carriers began to offer convergent services, they all started looking alike again.”
Indeed, in an increasingly competitive environment, wireless customers are more likely to ask, “What have you done for me lately,” said Pat Decker, executive director of customer loyalty and process engineering at AirTouch Communications Inc. “We have to keep refreshing their memories.”
The human aspect is the first step to providing good customer service, said Janice Huxley Jens, mobile industry marketing manager at Kenan Systems Corp. Having quality customer service representatives with a positive attitude toward the customer is key.
Customer care and billing solutions provider Subscriber Computing Inc. agreed. With the amount of competition in the wireless market, “Carriers really have to be proactive. Carriers have to know what makes their customers happy and what makes them unhappy, and they need to be able to react to it,” said Robert Aboitez, director of product management for the messaging division at SCI.
“The Internet is going to be a good place to get information about customers,” said Aboitez. “We track what pages a customer visits and when they want to speak to a customer service rep through the Internet, we pass that information along to the [rep] so they can see what they’ve been looking at and be prepared for that.”
In a customer-care solution, companies “typically try to have the system do as much as possible and the employee do as little as possible,” which reduces operating expenses, said Aboitez. “But we’re finding that customers want to speak with a person who knows them and can answer their questions.
“I think you’re going to start seeing an increase in training,” added Aboitez. “Not only about the invoice and the billing, but about the industry and the technology that your selling.”
Sprint Spectrum L.P., which recently announced it reached 1 million customers on its new personal communications services network, believes customer care is one of the top three critical functions of its business.
As such, customer service reps receive 320 hours of training before they deal with actual customers, as well as ongoing training one day per month, said Sprint PCS spokesman Tom Murphy.
“We take our customer care very seriously. For many customers, this is the first time they experience Sprint PCS.” Murphy said Sprint’s customer service representatives have all the information they need immediately available to them, including coverage areas, pictures of phones and information about the phones the company sells. Murphy speaks of one innovative customer service rep who, when answering questions from a blind customer, closed her eyes to walk the customer through the phone.
More and more, customer service representatives are expected to solve problems and satisfy the customer without going up the chain of command. At Sprint PCS, customer service reps are authorized to give airtime credit.
Many of the customer service options on the market today are designed to empower customer service agents by providing them with customer information and allowing them to solve problems based on pre-defined parameters, Kenan’s Jens agreed.
“We see rapid commoditization of the market-universally low costs and comparable level of service,” said Richard Hebert, chief executive officer of Sky Alland Marketing. “The only way to differentiate is customer service.”
Sky Alland’s customer service experience dates to 1984 when the company’s founder conducted surveys with automobile owners to improve customer relationships. The company has since added the telecommunications industry to its portfolio. Hebert said the company has learned lessons from other industries that it applies to the wireless industry, including the fact that high-end users have high expectations for quality of service.
“At AirTouch, building customer loyalty begins the minute the customer signs up for service. If we wait until the customer calls us, it’s too late,” said AirTouch’s Decker.
The wireless industry is unique in that churn rates are higher than in other industries, and carriers are beginning to take proactive measures to retain customers rather than focusing purely on reactive measures, said Shirley Evans, director of solutions marketing for Cincinnati Bell Information Systems.
“Significant turnover is still occurring and it is important for carriers to start treating the customer well, particularly if they want to retain that customer,” said Evans. “You don’t necessarily want to retain every customer, though.
“Carriers need to identify high lifetime value customers and understand how to approach the customer through specific intervention,” continued Evans.
With a churn rate of 3 percent to 4 percent per month, carriers must replace about one-fourth of their customer base every year to maintain subscriber levels, said Evans. Couple that with the cost of acquiring new customers, and carriers are faced with an expensive proposition just to maintain growth in subscriber levels.
“Churn is a fact of life, so to manage churn, carriers need to identify which customers are candidates to churn and then try to proactively market to and entangle the customer in the service,” said Saville’s Hart.
Good customer service is necessary in other areas besides churn management, including during customer acquisition, problem management, roaming and increasing minutes of use.
MobiLink, a company focused on the roaming experience, recently introduced its InfoRoam service, which provides customer service representatives with information on any cellular market in North America that can be used to give subscribers information while they are roaming, including roaming rates.
Providing customer service for roamers fits into the idea of providing superior service for high-end users because that segment is most likely to use their phone outside of their home area, said Steve Spradlin, managing director of MobiLink.
Roaming customers’ expectations are increasing, and as they “spend more money with a carrier, the expectation is that the phone can be used everywhere. Most customers are somewhat willing to accept that problems will occur, but the expectation also is that one call to a customer service representative will take care of it,” said Spradlin.
Carriers also can use customer service techniques to grow revenues by increasing minutes of use and getting customers to use enhanced features.
“Carriers want to identify upscale and cross-sale opportunities,” said CBIS’ Evans. “For instance, identify a segment of customers that use voice mail and then identify customers with the same characteristics that are not using voice mail. Then you can make contact with that customer and offer the service to them.”
