Will Customers Ignore Bad Customer Service?

In competitive industries a bad customer experience results to churn (telecoms, media, etc). How about in hotels? Hotels are supposed to deliver the best customer experiences considering that Four Seasons set a trend several years back… This week I have very interesting customer experiences, of which a lesson can be learned. In a very large city I stayed at Le Meridien, the experience with the hotel staff and facilities were very pleasant and the price fits the companies travel budget. That set my expectation in the days there after. I arrived in Dubai with a similar expectation, booked a room at Emirates Grand Hotel (which is twice as much as I paid in Le Meridien) and was very disappointed. First off I was told I was told to pay the entire amount of my stay in advance and asked for my passport very rudely… the front desk personnel looked at customers with dubious suspicion, its the first time in many months that I have encountered such a sour and unfriendly staff in the front desk. Considering that the front desk staff is Filipino (who are known for excellent service and hospitality) I am very disappointed. The since I have to wait for the room to be ready before I can dress up for an early meeting (which I missed) I was hoping that the front desk staff will offer for me to wait somewhere convenient…. However after charging my credit card (the amount that I could have stayed at Four Seasons) I was ignored completely.. To my dismay I have to find someone else in the hotel to ask where their restaurant is and at least sit there and wait painstakingly…. Indeed a very painful experience… Anyway this first impression means I will not be a returning customer to the Emirates Grand Hotel….

I did have bad experiences in better hotels like Hilton (room not ready on time, worm in fruits). However in both cases the hotel staff apologizes and offered to compensate me for my troubles (free stay, free food, etc)… I continued to stay in Hilton considering that the bad experienced are offset with the apologies and friendliness of the staff… Something that I sadly never saw in Emirates Grand Hotel.

The question is in Telecoms, how many bad experiences does subscribers tolerate before they churn and move to another operator? In some countries subscriber churn immediately, especially young pre-paid users….

Swedish Customer Service, Does it exist?

This past month my observation of customer service in Sweden was both reinforced and rebuffed. After observing how customer service is delivered in Sweden I came to the conclusion that customer service in Sweden is very bad. Take for example when I went to an electronic store and wanting to buy a TV on the spot, so I asked a sales rep standing by the TV displays about a 55-inch 3D TV… I got the answer that its not his department so I should look for someone else to help me, well after minutes of searching found one sales rep and told him that I am ready to buy out of the store, including a Bose surround system… After showing me several models and when I mentioned which one I will get, the sales rep went away since he saw a familiar face (a friend maybe) and started helping that person…. After 30 minutes of waiting I just god fed up and left… away with me is a business to them worth 7000€… its a small potential purchase but then again this illustrates how bad customer service is in Sweden.

I was very surprised though that Orensundskraft proved me wrong. They did have a very good customer service. Which started with a phone call since I wanted to have electricity on a flat I just signed up to. After 1 minute of finding where it is, the sales rep on the phone agreed to send a technician to turn on the electricity on the building at my preferred time…. No hassles. Just to see if the good customer service is consistent, I emailed support and asked to change the date and time. I got a prompt response from customer support rep Charlotte that its OK to move to another on time of my choosing.. I chose a time, communicated it and looked forward to the technician showing in front of the door. On the specified time, on the dot the technician showed up, took him 2 minutes to sort everything out… What I got was a consistently good customer service. Congratulations Oresundskraft, you demonstrated that Sweden is not hopeless after all when it comes to good customer service….. Keep up the good work!

OTT and other Data Hungry Applications are they GOOD or BAD?

I attended the MWC in Barcelona a few days back, one of the hottest topic I noticed is the effect of OTT apps on Operators bottom lines. The theme seems to have centered across how OTT cannibalizes traditional voice and messaging revenues. Is OTT really the culprit of shrinking revenues and margins for mobile network operators or is it their failure to understand what app-economy meant to them and how they can benefit on advancement of social media? How can existing operators co-exist with OTT players? Coexistence is the key, since no matter what operators do, OTT applications are here to stay, if one disappears 2 more starts-up on  garage somewhere.

Ericsson pointed out that the differentiators is in Customer Experience, also pointed out during their Key Note speech that in a few years the average usage of data will be 20MB per day. I tend to disagree with the statement of being a few years, the 20MB of data on smart phone users is already here, not even on billable data but more importantly non-billable data in form of advertisement to various smart phone applications. With advertising Google wins, and so does app developers, however Mobile operators loses, either they can't bill the data used by advertising going to devices or if they of customers complain about too much usage being billed. Most customers are not aware that their devices used so much data traffic and are only aware of the known data traffic coming from browsing and email… Social media is even considered by customers as free data, their right to use it without cost.

For operators what is the solution? Is there a holy grail of ensuring Customers are Happy and at the same time their network is not used as a free pipe for advertiser? Today most operators will give unlimited or high data plans to combat this, however this are expensive and only a small potion of the customer base can afford it. Some provide specific services for use of OTT and others go on the wrong path of not allowing OTT services to run on their networks.

My perspective is its all about discovery, knowing how your customers experience and interact with these OTT applications then designing services that addresses high free data usage. Discovery requires robust solution capable of extracting customer usage down to applications installed on devices and actual network usage, of course also ensuring that traditional usage like browsing and email are taken into account. Discovery is one thing, taking action on what ever is discovered is another, I think its called by a jargon named "Actionable KPIs). Question is what actions can be done? Should operators disallow OTT? Should they bill for such usage? What about advertising which uses the most data, just imagine all the angry birds applications that are receiving advertising on the background right at this moment? Perhaps the key is to stop advertising from reaching the applications, however if we do that Google and the whole industry of mobile and device advertising will never be happy…. As an operator are you ready to pick your battles?