Doriot: Incumbents Rate Mediocre in Customer Service

What information can service providers use to better understand customer needs and match their offers to those needs? And even if the ser-vice providers ask, do customers really know what they want before it’s offered?

Doriot: I think consumers do know at a real basic level what it is that they want, and I think it’s incumbent upon the service providers to get underneath the covers and understand what that is.

In some cases, [they can get that information through] surveying. In other cases, it’s looking at their own complaint data that they collect and track themselves. It’s really doing two things: one, measurement in an intelligent way that brings some insight to the customer’s experience, and then being able to link that meaningfully to business performance so they can make good decisions about capex investments, changes in conditions on the ground, service levels, new products in some cases and so on.

It’s one thing to say service providers should do this. But what makes you think they will actually do it?

Doriot: My own feeling is that a lot of a telecommunications companies pay little more than lip service to measurement, and they go about their business and have been historically fairly happy with their business results. It’s likely not to continue in that way for the foreseeable future because we have barriers being broken down by the technology practically every day, and it gets easier and easier to launch competing services and cherry pick customers from an incumbent.

Right. But at the same time we’re faced with a weak economy, which often sees service providers scaling back their initiatives and investments.

Doriot: Even when the economy was really booming you still saw a relative lack of investment that [could] lead to quick improvement of the customer ex-perience from the telcos. That’s not to say they’re not investing in new technology, but being able to bring those to market in a way that touches the customer in a meaningful sort of a way and improves their experience with the provider has been something that is a little bit lacking.

CFI Group North America www.cfigroup.com

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