Improving multi-channel journeys to transform the customer experience

Issue

Our customer, a telecommunications operator in the Pacific region, called on Sofrecom to improve the customer experience by implementing a journey-focused approach.

In a context of merging its fixed and mobile activities, the operator’s challenge is to strengthen team cooperation, while increasing customer satisfaction. The aim is to offer a simpler and smoother customer experience.

The project had 3 complementary objectives:

• Assessing the level of maturity of the digital customer relationship

• Identifying the difficulties of the operator’s customers in their different journeys through the operator’s different contact channels

• Building a plan to improve operational performance and internal organization so that customer service (the internal call center) can ensure a better experience for its users.

As part of this project, we have worked on several journeys including purchasing, assistance, claims and payment/collection. All the channels involved in these journeys, whether physical or digital, have been studied (web, call center, stores, etc.).

Methodology

A 2-stage approach, supplemented by an awareness day:

1/ Data collection and analysis
To carry out this project, we mobilized a team of Sofrecom Customer Experience Management specialists, reinforced by Orange experts.

Our consultants first carried out an inventory through:

• An audit of digital maturity on web traffic aspects (Google Analytics analysis, SimilarWeb, Moz, PageSpeed insights, etc.), functional coverage of actions available to customers (e.g. purchasing a prepaid recharge, obtaining assistance on a technical problem, etc.), and social listening (with Talkwalker)

• A customer service audit (call center): observations on the platforms, qualitative interviews with advisors and managers, and analysis of performance at level 1 and level 2.

• An analysis of the priority customer journeys selected following an analysis of the main actions carried out in-store and the reasons for contact with customer service.

2/ Raising awareness of the importance of the customer experience

Awareness-raising actions on customer experience issues were carried out with our customers’ teams; these actions made it possible to:

• Recall and emphasize the importance of adopting a common language, that of the customer, and to consider that satisfaction of customer expectations is eveyone’s priority. It was about exceeding personal internal goals to ensure the best possible customer experience.

• Share best practices for customer-centered approaches

3/ Co-construction and recommendations

Analysis of the different priority journeys made it possible to identify the improvements to be made on each of them. Our consultants then drew up a recommendation plan

Based on these recommendations, co-construction workshops were organized by the consultants with the operator's various business teams (in-store salespeople and customer service advisors, service technicians, back office, invoicing, marketing, IT, etc.). The challenge was to help identify priorities for action by journey.

Recommendations by journey were also supplemented by transversal recommendations thanks to the results of audits carried out on digital channels and on customer service.

In the end, our experts formulated nearly 120 operational or strategic recommendations to respond to identified customer issues. They have all been defined to be actionable over the coming months. To facilitate implementation, each recommendation identifies:

• Potential impacts on the information system,

• The necessary "sponsor" teams,

• Orange Group’s best practices.

An overall action plan was thus co-constructed with all stakeholders and the customer commitments recorded.

Thus, cooperation, transversality and co-construction were the keys to success.

Result

In summary, our client obtained through this project:

• An audit of its digital maturity

• A social listening study

• A roadmap to improve the general organization of the call center, interactions with other services, flow management, the quality of the message and the customer experience

• Recommendations and action plans for each journey studied.

Our customer now benefits from a clear, comprehensive and cross-functional understanding of the structuring aspects of transformation through customer experience. The highly operational action plans are ready to be implemented by its teams.

The expertise of our specialists, their ability to listen to understand the challenges and context of each team, and the promotion of good customer experience practices observed at other operators’ were decisive for success.

In a context of merging activities, our methodology combining data analysis, understanding of the customer's internal context and the setting up of cross-functional co-construction workshops made it possible to capitalize on the knowledge and vision of the operator's different entities to build customer commitments accepted by all.

According to our customer, the adoption of a common language and reference framework is “structuring to facilitate the implementation of the recommended action plan and to once again become the no.1 operator in terms of satisfaction in the local market”.