Three Ireland aims to offer customers what it bills as the “ultimate service” regardless of the user’s expertise.
“What we have been doing is delivering ultimate service across all customer engagements,” says Three Ireland’s customer retention director Ashley Cook.
He explains that “ultimate service” means one that is better than expected and available across all channels – stores, online, webchat, phone app and traditional voice telephone calls.
“It has to be seamless and frictionless,” he adds. “We have invested a lot in technology and the digital platforms that support traditional customer care channels such as voice.
“The most important thing is to ensure that the customer gets the service they want using the method of their choice. Technology is changing at a pace that is faster than people can keep up with; it is our job to ensure that this doesn’t get in the way of customer service.”
Cook points out that the aim is to cater for all customers regardless of their level of technological expertise. “If you take a step back and look at it from a generational perspective, Generations X and Y are digital natives while older generations are more comfortable on the phone.
“In fact, younger kids tend not to want to talk at all, they just want to interact digitally. Then you have a group in the middle which want a choice of channels depending on what they want to do. You have to have an offering that caters for all generations – you need to have the full menu.”
Digital channels
This means taking a particular approach to the design of the service. “You start with the customer experience and work back to the technology,” he says.
“You have to make sure the technology and services you offer are ones that customers actually want rather than the ones which you want to give. Digital channels may be very good but you can’t force people to use them.
“Our aim is to make those channels so good and so easy to use that customers are able to choose them and will want to choose them. At the same time, we will continue to offer all the other channels they may want to use.”
The seamless aspect is also critically important. In Three’s case this means that customers can switch from channel to channel and never need to have the same conversation twice. “This is key,” says Cook.
“If a customer starts an interaction across one channel such as the phone and then uses webchat or calls into store to continue, it needs to be picked up seamlessly all along the way. That’s been quite complex to achieve but the technology looks after it all in the background.”
This all sounds very good but how will Cook and his team at Three Ireland know if they are succeeding? Continuous monitoring and independent measurement is the answer.
The measure used is known as the Net Promoter Score, an index ranging from minus 100 to plus 100 that measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company’s products or services to others. It is used to gauge customers’ satisfaction with a company’s product or service as well as overall brand loyalty.
Three works with leading research company Qualtrics to measure this. “The question at the heart of this is would you recommend the service to a friend,” Cook explains.
Exceeds expectations
“What we have done with Qualtrics is map out our customers’ journeys from the start to the end of each particular process. Customers receive text messages or web links to allow them to tell us what they thought of their experience. We use that to understand if what we are doing meets or exceeds expectations of if we have to do better.”
Another aspect of the research is measurement of customer effort. “We want to deliver a service that is as frictionless as possible,” he continues. “That means minimising the amount of effort required of the customer.
“If a customer feels they had to do more than the company did to resolve their issue then we are doing something wrong. We get 10,000 reports back from customers every month and we use these to continually improve their experience and our service.”
One example of such an improvement is interactive voice response. “We did a lot of research into this. Customers don’t want to be presented with lots and lots of options and end up being misdirected because they don’t understand them all. They want it to be quick and simple.
“We have worked hard on this and we have now cut the time it takes to top up credit by more than two thirds.”
But they are not stopping there. “We are on a journey and there will always be things we can improve on. We are always asking customers where we can do better. We hold regular focus groups with both business customers and consumers and these translate directly into improved services such as the new app which we will be releasing shortly. Our aim is that every interaction a customer has with Three Ireland will be a positive experience for them.”