Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile industry to give their insights into the marketplace.
We all know that Brazilians are very sociable people who love mobile devices in all their variety. But now, no less than The Wall Street Journal has decreed that Brazil is, in fact, “the social media capital of the universe.” That’s actually very good news for Brazilian service providers as they enhance their customer-care offerings—because if consumers are satisfied with their service, they’ll recommend it to their friends, as a new Amdocs survey reveals.
The Feb. 5 Wall Street Journal story notes that “Brazil’s expanding middle class is increasingly going online, and social media are particularly popular because of Brazil’s hyper-social culture, social-media executives say.”
Very interesting—but how does that relate to our global consumer survey (conducted for Amdocs by Coleman Parkes, a leading analyst firm) that explores the link between proactive care tools, customer satisfaction and call center traffic?
The answer is simple: the survey revealed that the vast majority of customers would recommend their service provider to family and friends if they received relevant, proactive notifications from their provider and had simple self-service apps on their mobile device. The survey found that in addition to helping to increase customer satisfaction, the measures could also decrease call center traffic. And Brazilians’ affinity for social media just makes it much easier for people to recommend (or not recommend) their service provider.
Are you familiar with the term NPS? If not, you should be: NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is the industry-standard measure of customers’ willingness to recommend a service, and it directly correlates to customer satisfaction, retention and service provider profitability. Our survey shows that the provision of proactive care and self-service apps could be a highly effective strategy for helping service providers increase their NPS and reduce the burden on their call centers. But here’s the downside: according to the survey, consumers feel that service providers need to improve their online experience with more consistent and personal service.
Here are a few of the survey’s key global findings:
- Proactive services and self-care can improve NPS: 84% of consumers said they would be more likely to recommend their service provider if the provider was able to identify and pre-emptively resolve potential issues affecting them.
- Consumers are willing to embrace proactive care and self-service: 83% said they would follow proactive notification instructions, rather than call the contact center, to resolve issues affecting them individually; 76% would use a mobile app rather than call the contact center.
- Current proactive notifications and self-service tools are ineffective and can actually increase call center traffic: 73% of consumers said proactive notifications at present were not useful; and 24% of all notifications resulted in a call to the contact center, adding to costs instead of reducing them.
You can read more about the survey’s findings here.
So what’s the bottom line for Brazilian service providers? In a nutshell, they should do everything possible to increase that all-important NPS score—the measure of how many customers recommend their service. Because it’s getting easier for people to recommend those service providers who are making their lives easier (and to complain about the ones who aren’t)—especially in Brazil, the newly-crowned “social media capital of the universe.”
Nelson Wang is VP at Amdocs Latin America.
