WHITEPAPER

Customer Experience
Management in Telecoms:
4 Key Components

The Telco Disconnect.

Telecommunications providers have long
understood that in a crowded marketplace with
minimally differentiated products, the customer
experience they deliver can make or break the
business. Leading telcos have established a
direct relationship between customer satisfaction
and critical business metrics like churn and
revenue per user. According to extensive Bain
& Company research, satisfied telco customers
churn less, buy a larger basket of services, and
most importantremain loyal subscribers.1

Leading telcos have

established a direct
relationship between
customer satisfaction and
critical business metrics like
churn and revenue per user.

As the marketplace has become more saturated, consolidated, and commoditized, providers have
shifted their focus toward retaining customers and using upsell and cross-sell opportunities to increase
their average revenue per user. Because customers will commit themselves to multiple, more expensive
products only if they trust their provider, creating loyal customers is more important than ever. Even
knowing this, telcos continue to lag other industries when it comes to customer experience (CX). So whats
the disconnect?

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Customer Experience Management in Todays

Telecom Industry
With millions of subscribers, dozens of ever-changing products and plans, and a proliferation of sales and
service channels, telecom providers are exposing their customers to more and more complexity, and as
such, require more out of their CEM platform than companies in virtually any other business. If they exist
at all, most of todays telco feedback programs operate only within silos, and do not capture the overall
customer experience. Many more struggle to take action on their feedback and close the loop with
customers.
While the nature of the telecommunications business necessitates complex organizations, this doesnt
mean that the customer experience must suffer. Managing the customer experience at the scale and
complexity telcos require is possible, but legacy technologies and point solutions have been unable to
keep up and distribute actionable insights throughout the organization. As a result, the value to the telco
industry of the next generation of enterprise-level feedback technology will be enormous.
This whitepaper examines the core components of the next generation of CEM technology for telcos and
explains a comprehensive approach to help create a market advantage through effective operational
customer experience management.

4 Key Components of Leading Telecom CEM Programs

Lets examine the key components of a customer experience management platform that enables telcos to
win. The successful platform:

1) Unifies customer feedback across all channels

Simply asking some of your customers if they will recommend you
is no longer sufficient to increase loyalty and create a competitive
advantage. Telcos need to understand customer experiences beyond
scores. They must get to the root cause of issues at each interaction
point in each potentially multi-step service or sale. The next
generation of leading CEM systems will collect and analyze feedback
gathered through a variety of methods at three distinct, interrelated
levels: touchpoint, journey, and relationship.
Touchpoints are individual interactions with a customer,
such as a retail store visit to activate a phone or an inquiry
to a call center to ask about a bill. They are transactional in nature. It
is useful to measure the customers satisfaction with and comments
on a specific interaction so that your company understands strong
and weak points in experience delivery. Transactional feedback
programs are currently geared exclusively toward these types of
interactions.

Medallia Customers
Capture From Many
Channels

Email

Contact Center

Online

SMS

Receipt

Web Chat

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Journeys (sometimes called episodes)

typically consist of a series of sequential
touchpoints that accomplish a larger goal for a
customer, like upgrading a device or fixing a spotty
signal. Measuring satisfaction with journeysnot just
individual touchpointsprovides critical insight into
whether each touchpoint is helping the customer
accomplish her larger goal. It can also reveal broken
processes that would be impossible to identify by
measuring touchpoint or relationship satisfaction
alone.

Measuring Customer Journeys

To Create A Competitve
Advantage
Organizations that can manage customer journeys can generate improved customer satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue,
and higher employee satisfaction, according
to research by McKinsey & Company.2

Relationship satisfaction is the customers

broad impression of the company as a
whole. Do customers have an overall impression of your brand and the combined experiences you offer?
The touchpoints and journeys the customer experiences contribute to this overall relationship. Relationship
feedback programs and many market research studies measure relationship-oriented feedback.
A comprehensive view across customer experiences that happen at each touchpoint, for each journey, and
across the relationship is critical. When executives, insights researchers, and management trade an isolated
glimpse of customer feedback for a more complete view, they gain clarity and context. Everyone benefits
from this insightespecially the frontline. Rather than acting in a vacuum, frontline employees can own
specific insights tailored to the issues they can affect, empowering them to drive change and improve the
overall customer experience.

2) Delivers actionable feedback to the entire organization

In the fiercely competitive telco marketplace, every customer matters. Thats why executives, managers, and
frontline employees need access to feedback data in real time and the training and authority to act on it.
To engage every employee to deliver a great experience, a CEM platform must provide tailored views for
every user rolenot just corporate insights and market research.
Role-specific reporting
Truly putting the customer at the center of your business means sharing and taking action on feedback
throughout the organization. While delivering a holistic view of customer feedback, CEM platforms must
offer tailored reports, insights, and specific actions to fit the needs of each user role. When employees see
what is relevant to them (e.g., a store manager sees how his store is doing and how to improve, or a call
center agent sees her specific weaknesses and training opportunities), they will access the insights and
actions they need to improve.
Given frontline employees are interacting with individual customers, they will benefit the most from
understanding the broader business context around an individual transaction. Corporate insights analysts
gain the most from powerful data analysis tools, particularly those used to analyze unstructured verbatim
feedback. Each employee should have a tailored view of the CEM platform that reflects his or her role, as
well as the ability to customize the application to personal preferences.
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Feedback connected to action

A phone call to recover a dissatisfied customer can save years of subscription revenuenot to mention
preserve the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell. This cannot be done in the aggregate or with a monthly
customer satisfaction report. It must happen customer by customer, and in real time.
A telco CEM platform must contain a suite of enterprise-level data analysis tools and must also be
designed for taking action and closing the loop with individual customers. The most useful CEM
applications connect feedback to action and give users the alerts, actions, and tools they need to close
the loop. Specific features of the most useful applications include sophisticated case management and
workflow functionality that connects with Salesforce.com and other CRM systems, and the ability to email
customers through the application and record the whole conversation.
Frontline users also need mobile applications (e.g., iOS and Android apps) that put customer feedback
data and the ability to close the loop at their fingertips all day long. Because customer feedback is wired
across the organization and is continuously accessible, customer-facing employees can take action,
recover customers, and activate promoters in real time.

3) Captures multi-modal feedback on the customers terms

To enable customers to easily give feedback wherever they are and to maximize the volume of data
captured, leading telco CEM programs employ every means available to capture feedback from their
customers: SMS, email, contact centers, IVR, web, mobile apps, static feedback forms, and more. An
intelligent program tailors the feedback collection method to the interaction type, delivering brief SMS
surveys within minutes of a retail store interaction and reserving longer web surveys for customer
journeys, key accounts, and relationship feedback.
Each arm of the program must also automatically know what the other arms are doing in order to avoid
overburdening customers with requests for too much feedback. The feedback process is still a part of the
customers experience, so your CEM platform should be able to keep response rates high over time by
avoiding survey fatigue. In addition to managing fatigue, advanced sampling rules must ensure that every
survey program gets enough of a sample to be statistically valid.
Multi-mode feedback collection
The best CEM platforms allow telcos to work with a wide variety of channels including SMS, email, contact
centers, IVR, web, mobile apps, and static feedback forms. Incorporating such a broad range of feedback
sources means each source must have its own data file processed individually, automatically, and without
the need for a standard format.
Many vendors claim to be able to function with enormous volumes of data from virtually any source,
distribute it within a complex organizational hierarchy, and analyze it in real time. However, serious
technical challenges have caused scores of telco CEM implementations to fail. Ensuring your partner has
an implementation record that matches its claimsand plenty of client references is critical.

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Built-in text analytics

Some of the richest feedback comes in the form of unstructured data. Textual feedback allows customers
to provide details of what they like and dont like about their experiences. CEM platforms that require
companies to either analyze text separately from operational, financial, and behavioral data, or that
require third-party integration to do so, miss the connections that can help telcos prioritize their actions
and investments. Built-in text analytics allows
companies to surface insights hidden in text in real
time and gives teams the information they need to
address the root cause of an issue.

For leading CEM

programs, text analytics is
critical to improving crossjourney processes.

With unstructured text parsing, speed is critical.

Telco providers must be able to analyze troves of text
feedback to pull out emerging trends, identify root
causes, and prioritize the actions that will have the
greatest impact on the customers experience. All of this must happen in secondsnot minutes or days.
This is rarely possible when text analytics is not native.

For leading CEM programs, text analytics is critical to improving cross-journey processes, because textual
feedback often gets at the details companies need to understand where processes break down across
a journey. A CEM platform that unifies both structured (scores and ratings) and unstructured (verbatim
comments and SMS) feedback makes all their feedback speak a common language. A well-designed
platform helps telcos uncover trends and opportunities for improvement that would never be obvious
through only analyzing scores or having a separate, cumbersome process for text analysis.
Wireless companies in particular have a built-in feedback collection advantage: SMS surveys, which
often have response rates greater than 25%, are free. At the same time, the verbatim-heavy nature of
SMS replies (as with web survey comment boxes) demands that the CEM provider be able to analyze
unstructured data to pull out key trends and emerging topics in real time and in multiple languages
natively.

4) Manages speed and complexity at scale

Because telco business models are large and complex, successful CEM platforms must be able to adapt
to this complexity. Telcos typically run the worlds largest satisfaction tracking programs, and their CEM
platforms back-end technology must be powerful enough to process millions of records a day, update
organizational and user structures on demand, and deliver real-time analytics.
Organizational complexity and change management
With dozens of telco departments and channels interacting with customers, its critical that CEM platforms
be able to manage multiple organizational hierarchies, user roles, and access scopes. The insights and
actions the platform delivers to employees should be tailored, relevant, and hopefully also addictive.
This is a complicated logistical and technical problem, and it only gets more difficult when considering
how often organizations and roles change.

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In retail and call center channels, where high turnover is a fact of life, telcos inevitably experience
constant changes in roles and ownership. Not only must a CEM platform accurately reflect organizational
structures within the platform, it should make change management fast, easy, and automatic. On the
ground, this means that new stores and employees wont have to wait weeks or months to start receiving
and taking action on customer feedback. Instead, change happens instantaneously, allowing employees
to trust the data they are getting and not miss a beat when it comes to closing the loop and driving
improvement actions.
Programmatic complexity: sampling big data at scale
The ultimate technical challenge for a telco that uses a CEM platform is the tremendous complexity
involved in managing dozens of feedback programs collecting millions of survey records through many
simultaneous feedback mechanisms across an ever-expanding set of interaction channels. Once the
platform captures feedback, the challenge is getting the right data to the right person in real time and
presenting it simply and intuitively. Unsurprisingly, CEM platform implementation failures are common and
costly. Most CEM platforms cant handle the Big Data needs of a typical telco program.
A CEM partner should work with its clients to map an intelligent, automatic sampling strategy to support
feedback solicitation at the touchpoint, journey, and relationship levels across all channels simultaneously,
then offer a CEM platform that manages it all automatically. The asynchronous file-based sampling system
should filter out records according to customizable sampling rules and prevent duplicate recordsall
without overburdening customers with a barrage of surveys or the telco with a cumbersome manual
process.
Mapping all this feedback, collected through a wide variety of overlapping business channels and
feedback mechanisms, to the complex organizational hierarchies and user structures of telco providers is
a difficult technical challenge that a CEM platform should excel in solving. The best are able to do it in real
time.
Legacy vendors and point solutions typically give only a few individuals access to the system, which
generates reports monthly or quarterly. By contrast, the platforms of leading telco CEM programs provide
access to a unified view of real-time touchpoint, journey, and relationship feedback that is open to the
entire organization, from executives to frontline employees. When the entire company aligns behind
analyzing and taking action to improve the whole customer experience on a daily basis, the result is a
seismic shift toward true customer centricity.

Summary
Although telco providers understand the business value of improving the customer experience, few have
been able to deliver on the promise. A key reason behind this incongruity is that legacy CEM platform
providers and point solutions have failed to provide an application that can unify the entire customer
experience, drive action at the frontline and across the organization, and deliver the speed, complexity,
and scalability the telco industry requires.
1

http://www.bain.com/publications/articles/can-communications-service-providers-earn-customers-love.aspx

http://hbr.org/2013/09/the-truth-about-customer-experience/ar/1

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About Medallia
Medallia is the Customer Experience Management (CEM) company that is trusted by hundreds of the
worlds leading brands, including O2, Telstra, Beeline, Verizon, Votaphone, and Sunrise. We enable
companies to survey and capture customer feedback across Web, social, mobile, and contact center
channels, understand it in real-time, and take action to improve the customer experience (CX).
We offer world-class engineering, technology innovation, a customer-centric services organization,
and a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) application that is accessed by all your employees, from the C-suite
through to the frontline. Medallia helps companies create customers who love your business. Founded
in 2001, Medallia has regional headquarters in Silicon Valley, London, and Buenos Aires. Learn more
at www.Medallia.com.

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