There is news today that Sprint has made a massive leap forward in its customer care operation and has gone from being a real laggard in this area to being top dog in the US – at least on one key metric: wait time before reaching a human being (once through the IVR and into the call center queue). According to a survey from Pali Research (irritatingly, registration required for that link – but a good summary here):

We recently concluded our 6^th survey of wireless customer care response times and Sprint has leapt to the best performance of its peers from the worst in our first survey 2.5 years ago… Sprint’s survey results of 91% in Q3 2008 soundly beat its peers:  AT&T Wireless – 33%, T-Mobile – 43%, and Verizon – 85%. 

I think this is incredibly impressive – Sprint has hardly been a paragon of good performance in the wirelessarena lately, and has had one or two other major things to worry about recently too. But it made customer care a major focus area when Dan Hesse took over (see this earlier post) and the results are kicking in. This is one timely demonstration of the point that I made in my previous post on the topic of customer care at telcos, that fundamentals need to improve dramatically in this area. Kudos to Sprint for fixing this key element of customer service so quickly.

Having said that, this is just one metric. It doesn’t measure customer satisfaction, first call resolution, or the volume of calls to care in the first place (another area where Sprint was until recently also the laggard among its peers) – it only measures time to answer – admittedly, an important element but also an easy one to fix if enough resources and money are thrown at the problem. I’ll be watching with interest as other surveys and reports on the other elements of telco customer care are released in the coming months to see if Sprint’s efforts in those other areas have paid off too.

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This example from photographer-blogger Thomas Hawk is the perfect illustration of how enormously frustrating it can still be to deal with the phone company or its various subsidiaries (it could just as easily be Verizon or Qwest as AT&T in this case).

I spoke to a group of salespeople from a software vendor who sell to the telecoms industry this week. The topic of my presentation was how telcos are transforming themselves and in particular the evolution of customer care (or customer experience as they’ve apparently been taught to call it by Accenture). For all the complex and important sounding changes I discussed with them in terms of processes and software applications, the fact is that there is still something very fundamentally wrong with customer care when people are still having experiences like the one detailed by Thomas Hawk on his blog. It goes way beyond software and back to the approach taken by the telco to the whole question of care.

Telcos need to:

• see customers as customers, not as a series of transactions, and as such give each of them one number to call which will allow them to deal with any issue associated with their account
• equip the person on the other end with a holistic view of the customer so that they know everything about them, and capture whatever information they enter in the IVR stage permanently so they don’t have to keep repeating the same information over and over again to each new person/machine they talk to
• empower individuals in call centers to really solve problems for customers, and not just pass them over to someone else. Give them more decision making authority and allow them to chase other employees as necessary to get things done instead of making the customer do the running around
• remember that if the customer is calling care it is because you have not done something that they want you to have done, and they expect you to be able to fix it. This is your problem, not theirs, and they have every right to expect you to deal with any complexity that exists that may make this more difficult to achieve than it should be. Don’t tell them why you can’t do it – instead, figure out when and how you will do it, and let them know.

All of this is so basic, and yet telcos still struggle with it at the most fundamental level. A good chunk of the transformation of the customer experience that’s happening at the moment should be going into changing attitudes rather than applications, or all the investment in the world in new software and processes isn’t going to make a difference.

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