How to Introduce a Personalised Service Experience ft. Deutsche Telekom
As the largest Telekom provider in Europe, it is fair to say that Deutsche Telekom (DT) knows a thing or two about service. Since its founding in 1996, the company has amassed an international presence by keeping its finger on the pulse of evolving market and customer demands. In 2019, their ability to satisfy customer wants and needs continues and is clearly demonstrated by its customer service department’s transformation and adoption of social and personalisation tools in the last years.
Onno Hoffmann, heading Special Operations & Innovation at Deutsche Telekom’s Customer Service in Germany and Dominik Bauersch, who is responsible for Digital Business & Transformation, are at the forefront of the company’s mission to offer personal and tailormade services in a digital world. On Tuesday 8th of October 2019, at Customer Contact Week Europe, Onno and Dominik will join speakers from many other leading European companies to share a more detailed insight into their journey to the next level of customer care and their plans to take it further. In the meantime, they share three actionable tips for successfully introducing a personalised digital service experience into your customer contact centre:
Start Small, But Start
Pilot digital services, try out digital contact channels, improve your self-services and build up from that. Deutsche Telekom’s personalisation journey initially began several years ago when Dominik lead the launch of a large customer experience programme called “customer first” with which they ran a lot of tests and pilots to optimise customer journeys, such as changing provider and moving houses, into a personalised service experience. They explored different ways to improve customer satisfaction and first done rates and a variety of measures have been implemented over the last years. A new customer care concept for the 1st level business with a regional routing design and clear regional accountability for customers in a western region of Germany was also part of the programme and delivered first promising results. But time was not right due to limited process and digital capabilities that time. However, had they not taken the time to run this pilot, they would not be where they are today.
Involve the Entire Company
If you are in the customer service department and are the only one responsible for customer satisfaction, change that. Bring in the entire company and get more people to acknowledge and accept responsibility for the customer experience. In the end, everybody has a stake and contributes to it, so make sure that they also have a mandate to contribute to it
Offer a Seat at the Table for Employees and Customers
Include as many customer service employees with an interest in creating an even better customer experience in the ideation process, regardless of their hierarchy level and background. With the power of the crowd, you boost responsibility and motivation and, from there, customer service starts to be a cultural aspect of the entire company. Another lever for broader involvement is the installation of online collaboration platforms such as Telekom’s customer laboratories or customer ideation workshops. Through this you can improve, uncover and learn about new digital channels to further improve the customer experience. “Since summer 2018 we have been turning our traditional call center sites into regional service shops.” Onno states. “Therefore we have divided the German market into regions and assigned each to a community of customer service agents, who are responsible for all customer issues and share the market success with colleagues from shops and networks. Like a small business these agents participate from their results by an incentive scheme based on community targets gained in their customer region. Since presenting agents with the opportunity to participate in decision making, employee satisfaction in one of their call centres for example, has boosted from 70 to 90%, call transfers have dropped by half and the rate of first contact resolutions have risen significantly.
