Is tourism an answer to building sustainable communities?

I spend the weekend in London and the thought of how to improve lives in poor communities crossed my mind…  Currently we are heavily investing in higher yield farming methodologies to help families and communities, the model is working very well with the first farms sustainable, employing several families paid at a premium. Now while in London going from one place to another, the city is very busy especially tourist snapping pictures. It reminded me of Thailand and Malaysia where they have tours organized to see farms… Now the question that crossed my mind is can tourism generate additional  income to the farms or the community we have pledge to help?

Where the farms are located, although far from Manila, the beauty of nature is displayed at its best. Beautiful caves, amazing waterfalls, jungles and forest, pristine beaches, perfect waves…. Generating revenue to sustain communities of course will require investment to ensure a wonderful and unforgettable experience for guests who come to visit. The question is will there be enough revenue to justify the investments.. Unless the investment is the charitable donation….

Taking Health Gobal and Mobile

During the Mobile Edge event held at Microsoft in Lisbon I spoke about innovations and mobile health. Being the last speaker for the event, as usual attendees were tired, eager to get to the cocktails or go home… so to make it interesting I shortened my presentation. Having said that there some valuable insights.

If we look at today’s world… Almost every person on the planet has some form of a mobile device. We demand immediate information, anywhere.. Including those related to health. So if we feel strange or feel ill we look to the web or the net for answers, immediate diagnosis in that case, and in most cases we get wrong information.

After visiting a medical practitioner,  Doctors would like to stay in touch to make sure our health issues are being addressed and most medical practitioners want to ensure that medications given are taken properly and are effectively.

In fact today there are more than 100,000 mhealth related applications available on public application stores and in the US alone there were 247 million people who have downloaded  an  mhealth app in 2013 alone.

However most mHealth app today are based on wearable and fitness devices

Mobile Health  is a very fast growing economy on its own and projected to be around 58B US$ by 2020 for applications alone. A small piece of the health industry which is projected to be around 6T US$ at that same time.

mHealth is such a hot topics these days that even Google and Apple have joined in...

Considering that wearables alone will be worth around 12B US$ by 2018

However in the future it will no longer be wearables that will drive mHealth, it will be the need for actual medical care.

And this is due to huge savings on the way medical care is provided to a growing population, a population that is demands real time and increasingly mobile.

Hence some countries already have taken advantage of this opportunity. Take the Medicon Valley as an example, it is being geared to the the next version of Silicon Valley in the medical field. The Öresunds region which encompasses Southern Sweden and Denmark will soon no longer be called Öresund even by locals...

but will be known as Medicon Valley.

In this region, today, you will find the largest concentration of life science companies and organizations... Most if not all are already having their own mHealth app...

• 80 biotech companies
• 20 pharma companies
• 100 medtech companies
• 7 science parks with a significant focus on life science
• 6 incubators, of which 3 have a significant focus on life science
• 80 contract research organizations and contract manufacturing organizations
• 40,000 employees in the private life science sector
• 12 universities, 5 of which supply life science related educations                 
• 32 hospitals, of which 11 are university hospitals

So the question is do you want to join this massive wave and revolutionize health by  making it truly mobile…  and global? How do we help those who need medical care but can not afford it?

Manila Hotel - Hits and Misses

During my childhood in the Philippines,

Manila hotel is the premiere destination to have your guest to stay in, to have the most glamorous parties in town… Decades later bigger hotel brands with their impeccable 5 star services has come to the Philippines so its time to check back on how Manila Hotel is doing

The building itself needs renovations, from the outside it does not look very appealing to stay into, it is no longer the preferred accommodation for the jet set or the business traveler. Arriving into the hotel, even in a posh car the bell service is actually no service. Not even an offer to assist guests with their luggage. Security personnel were not courteous either in screening luggage that comes into the hotel… It seems they have sacrificed customer satisfaction for the sake of perceived security. The reception is no better with the staff snobbish and impolite and there seem to be a lot of distrust to their guests….

Inside the hotel, the decors brings you back to the time of the Spanish regime in Manila. Its like stepping into a time machine giving you the all the opulence during the time of Marcos and all luxury that comes with it. I feel nostalgic as I entered the room given to me, a flat sreen TV inside the bathroom brought me back to the reality of the modern age… Although the paintwork is relatively new, it can be improved to give the impression of a modern classic instead of antique. To my surprise the Spa is open 24 hours a day… a far cry from most hotels that closes in the evening. Sleeping comfort is superb.

Business services which is typically free in most moderns hotels are not free at Manila hotel, prating is 1.5 USD per page… that’s a lot of money for a piece of paper, well even more expensive than printing a dollar bill :-). Here Manila Hotel has a lot to learn, it has not discovered yet that high spenders are mostly business travelers (who dines in and prefers to stay and spend within the hotel premises to save time). Manila Hotel in itself now a days is reduced to delayed passenger sanctuary, not the kind of customers you wan in a luxury hotel.

Breakfast is great, it has not lost its old charm of providing spread from various regions of Asia and Europe. Services are good too, except when you are asked to sign a 25USD bill for breakfast. For all its charm Manila hotel has lost its title of luxury, it is no longer the place to stay… The bigger foreign hotel chains has done a much better job of providing excellent experiences to its customers, something that Manila Hotel needs to learn if it wants to stay on top of the Hotel business in the Philippines.

I won’t be staying in Manila  Hotel again unless its free or if I need to go to the Spa or the gym past midnight.

Making a difference through farming and community services

In the beginning of the year I had the opportunity to visit rural areas north of the Philippines, where I grew up as a kid. The place has changed a lot since last time I visited there 18 years ago. There were progress made, people are still happy but poverty is still abundant. Although most people survive with their basic needs through farming and foraging there are still a lot of people with no permanent jobs, no source of income. Most farms are tended manually, hard labour and no machines making farming ineffective and unproductive. Due to the lack of infrastructure there are a lot of hits and misses as well, some years are good, some years are bad with most farmers ending in heavy debts. Visiting the farms it dawned to me that we should be able to help the community, essentially give back to the community where I send some childhood years. Hence me and my brother hatched a brilliant plan of acquiring lands in the area, developing this lands and employing people. The ultimate goal is to be able to help over a thousand families in the area, that’s equivalent to over 5000 people, our way of giving back to the community and making a small difference on our own way in this very big wide world where we lived in.

Since I have my business to attend to we hatched the plan of having my parents involved. My brother will essentially manage the business, my parents will oversea local operations while I simply advise on business and strategic matters, essentially a very small portion of my non-working time to give back to the community. We are starting small helping 5 families to start with while keeping that ultimate goal in mind. How are we giving back to the community? Its essentially simple focusing on people, infrastructure and the environment.

• Build infrastructure to make farming much easier. Dams, water ways, power distributions, access roads

• Acquire struggling farms at a premium and employ the same farmers giving them a stable income on top of the premium paid for their farms.

• Develop the farms to become productive and sustainable

• Hire workers and pay them a much higher salary than what the local government pays their employees

• Provide housing for free

• Supplement their incomes with free food stuff

• Provide scholarship to deserving students

• Provide free health care and free medical outreach program by bringing competent doctors from Metro Manila during outreach programs

• Organize festivals for the community every after harvest, recognizing their hard work and dedication.

• Facilitate financial service, micro finance to start with

• Create clean, green and sustainable farms without harming the environment

• Replanting on deforested areas

This we do funded by our own pockets without any help from the government with the goal of being able to help a thousand families long term. Once we have proven success for this community services model we will expand, bringing in more external investments to the community from investors who share our principles, our ideals and our commitment to support and develop the community. If you are interested in participating to develop impoverish rural communities in the Philippines in your own small way please feel free to contact me.

Improving experiences for the most demanding customers

The summer has been hectic with customer  deployments, balancing work and personal life, kids and businesses. With all things happening here and there I neglected writing, even with all those extra time on long flights. Now finally on a flight between Kuala Lumpur and Manila and have time to write about demanding customers. Customers who demand for the best, they are everywhere, like you and me. There have been a few surprises in exceeding customer expectations and there are bad misses. Let’s take SAS as an example, on a  flight to Stockholm the stewardess started singing, entertaining the entire flight, it was short flight but then again, they exceeded expectations. On the flight back SAS lost my luggage, then promised to send it to my flat after it arrives on the next flight. The bag arrived at the airport but they were not able to deliver since they can’t find my flat and only got it 8 hours later. Now I wonder if SAS delivery spend 8 hours finding my flat in a small city, how lost can they be in running an airline business and much more lost in delivering good customer experience.

The most demanding customers today can be found having mobile phones, of which they demand excellent services in every way. From providing voice services where the expectations is zero dropped  calls, very fast data speed and excellent customer service. Every mobile operator in the world strives to provide the best quality of service to their customers, however not all of them succeeds. In my previous post I talked about several apps on the market today that allows a mobile phone user to test their services and share it on the net. The question in doing that is what benefit is it to the actual user? Does it give him/her a better service? Or do he/she use it to justify moving to another service provider. It is true that service quality is a big driver in churn, however is much more than a slow data in a particular area, its all about the overall experience from services provided to interaction with a service personnel.

Now imagine, instead  of calling your service provider to complain about bad services or bad experience, would you rather simply tap your phone and it takes care of the rest? Including getting updates about the bad service you experienced all the way to getting if fixed. In this way we can demand of better service, we can demand of faster response and faster resolution, we can demand of being in the know, we can demand of the correct fixes instead of  customer service agent simply selecting the top 10 answer on their list of issues.

If a service provider is able to meet our demands, what's next?

Leaving Facebook - Never ever give your ID to FB!

CNN published an issue  in Facebook today... where FB users are most likely billed high on their mobile data due to autoplay settings in FB. Now I turned off autoplay on FB but then FB suddenly logged me out and starts to ask to upload my ID... Something I will never do in social media considering that they already know a of things about you, why would you give FB your ID.

Giving your ID to FB allows them to control everything about you,  from your permissions to bank account to government records and can be used by hackers to have access to everything about you and everything you own...

So if FB ask for your ID, you have been warned!

Limiting frustration caused by mobile networks

When using our mobile devices, how many of us have become frustrated that the services provided are very slow, especially when using social media? Consider the horror of chatting to a friend or worse your impatient teenage child and your message are being delivered minutes later if not hours later. To avoid such frustrations applications that can tell you how good the services being provided would come in handy. Here comes  several apps that enable mobile phone users to determine whether services provided at a particular  location by a particular mobile service provider is good or bad. And with the option to share such results in social media a user can notify their friends what to expect, lowering the amount of frustrations being experienced. Is such an application useful for you?

Is security policy an excuse for bad customer experiences?

During the CommunicAsia 2014 we hosted meetings in hospitality suites for VIP visitors at the Marina Bay Sands, one of the best hotels in Singapore. However the experience was not all great. The restaurants, yes they were very accommodating and even opened the kitchen for us for lunch (very late indeed). However security policy of going from one tower to another is a let down. To be able to cross the Marina Bay Sands famed infinity pool area you should be a hotel guest. Which we were, and had one VIP guest registered and all… Having said that after lunch the area security denied us to pass through the pool area due to security reasons, out registered VIP guest is not staying in the hotel… what a bummer. This is very sad for Marina Bay Sands known for accommodating their customers to the best possible way.

Reminds me the same excuse is being made by Air France, even in first class like the horror stories my well known friends told me…. They will never fly Air France again… As for Marina Bay Sands does it warrant we stop hiring suites in the hotel?

Compared to Mandarin Marina, where they went through all the lengths to ensure that our VIP guest is treated as VIP, I think Marina Bay Sands still have a lot to learn in providing excellent customer service to its staff. As for me personally I won’t be staying at Marina Bay Sands anytime soon…. BTW Mandarin Marina was awarded best hotel in Singapore last year.

The Future of Delivering Unparalleled Customer Service for Mobile Networks

I was in meetings  in one of the top 5 largest telecom markets globally in the past days and witnessed the birth of a new breed in delivering excellent customer service. Just imagine your service provider calling you of a bad experience you encounter before you can complain…. Imagine a world where your experience in using a mobile network is constantly being improved, a world where delivery of data services is so seamless you will never ever have to call customer services to complain. Imagine a world where your mobile network service provider cares more for you than they do on how much money you spend on their network. Imagine the future of connectivity so reliable that you will never ever be out of touch again…

Fortunately for us this future has arrived, soon you will never ever have to complain again since you are confident that every bad experiences you encounter while using mobile internet or your mobile phone are being constantly improved. You will never have to worry again that mobile network operators are tracking your usage and behaviors through hidden probes in the network. You will never have to worry again that every transaction you did with your mobile device is recorded somewhere in the network and are being accessed by someone whom intentions are not known to you. Soon you can use your mobile device with complete ease of mind and complete confidence that the services you use will be seamless and of excellent  quality.

How is this all possible? Not by using hidden recordings or probes that cost a fortune to mobile network operators but by a simply enabling mobile phones to automatically flag bad experiences  the user has encountered without the user having to do anything… This automated bad experience flagging then becomes an input to mobile services provider automated optimization process. This will eliminate the possibility of big brother watching everything since the device will simply send bad experiences and remove the need to monitor every transaction the device  or the user has made.

Losing Michelin star due to bad experiences

I was in a meeting in Copenhagen at Kiin Kiin, known for being the first Thai Restaurant in Europe with a Michelin star. Sure the food was great, absolutely delicious and in that respect it deserves its Michelin star. However is Michelin star now simply limited on how good the food is? And does Michelin star still matters?

Well Michelin star still commands respect, specially in setting higher prices, however there are lots of good restaurants with great food that has no Michelin star such as Sillen & Makrilen in Helsingborg. But what if service is so bad, does a restaurant deserve a Michelin star?

Back to Kiin Kiin, I have been there serveral times and the last two times on meetings the service was atrocious, really, really bad. First there was no fresh young coconut juice, a signature on any good Thai restaurant.. and even no apologies for not carrying it. Secondly the waiters are just so bad in explaining what's in the food. And last time I was there they gave a defective chair that the chair collapse before I can even sit on it.. to my horror and stares of everyone in the restaurant... How can you give your guest a broken chair? They also try to cram so many people in the restaurant that the experience of having a nice dinner is no longer there..

Since Kiin Kiin provides a very bad service and very bad experience that the food starts to taste bad, should they not lose their Michelin star?

Preventing planes from going missing ever again

The search for the missing Malaysian airlines plane is still ongoing several days after the plane disappeared from radar view. Could such a difficulty be avoided in the future? Various aviation experts have their own theories as to what has happened to the plane and what can be done to prevent such an anomaly from occurring again. Now the question is "can the issue of not being able to locate a plane be avoided in the future by using commercially available technologies today?". The answer is YES, with mobile devices.

As you know most Smart phones or devices are GPS enabled and such GPS coordinate or location can be made available by the device, for example to Google if it has Google service installed or to any other application that ask for location. If all airlines follow the example of Qatar Air on their 787 fleet where mobile services and WiFi services are available then it would have been easy to find the last known location of the plane even if it went out of radar range. But How?

Let's follow the thought of an individual who would board a plane with mobile service or WiFi service enabled. The person will then turn on his mobile device  on board, connect to the internet, use social media telling his friends how cool it is to be able to do that while in  flight. He might even send and SMS  or make phone call. All those activities can be location tagged, either stored on the phone or sent to a server somewhere depending on which application runs on the phone…

If such device for example has a customer experience agent such as Geoptima then the last known location of that device will always be available. Of course with just one device active or connected it is still an inaccurate location, but imagine what if all passengers use their devices… we can then look into history which of those device has last sent a location and where, in that case it would have been possible to know where the missing plane is and not spend millions of dollars and countless man hours in searching for its whereabouts.

If only we can contribute on our own little way to the world then at least we can help people and save tax payer's money…. To do that we will have to convince mobile operators first on its value but perhaps it is possible to provide such capabilities directly to consumers for free as part of our Corporate Social Responsibility program….

I am in Egypt, and I was hoping that the country has changed after several changes in its leadership. But sadly it has gotten worse. On my way to check-in for my flight I was met by a greeter asking to help... so I played along, I noticed he knew all the security guys in the airport, so every security check point he asked me to give money to the security guy (well I think he pocketed most himself). So I passed 2 security checks without being checked, not even going through the Xray machines... This is so rampant that anyone can smuggle anything outside the country without being checked for just 10 US$... Just imagine you can make a plane disappear for only 10$....

Customer Experience Improvement observations at MWC and beyond

During MWC Customer Experience talk is all about implementation in various ways. Last year it was all about exploring the concept, now most vendors have  incorporated CEM in their portfolio in one way or another. Not only vendors and operators were talking about customer experience improvement programs but even regulators are moving from traditional technical metrics to customer experiences as the main metric to determine operator compliance to license conditions. This is all good and well, the question is how far are this programs going? Are there any success? Are they really making a difference to the bottom line?

I am on my way to Jakarta, flying via Qatar. I am always amazed how good services are with Qatar Air. Well this week have receive several upgrades from a normal room to a splendid suite from a normal airline seat to my own private cabin to the point that it get me thinking of a certain high flying club, but like in all personal things I wanted my better half for that.

Being in the Middle East the CEM award for Telcos come to mind. IQPC who is organizing the CEM Summit in Dubai should now have an idea on who the nominees are. If you ask me for nominees I would say best airline will be a toss up between Emirates and Qatar air…. Only problem is that the award is for telco… on which I can rate Qatar air low for having an inaccessible WiFi on board. Not only that is paid but you can't actually use it since instructions on how to connect is wrong or do not work. With this I admire Norwegian on the simplicity on how their WiFi on board service works.

In Dubai at the end of this month, Gurol Kurt of TeliaSonera will be talking about delivering promises like TeliaSonera. Now I can almost already confirm that TeliaSonera, at least in Sweden do not deliver that promise very well. Let me take my case while in Singapore Telia slapped me a very huge bill for data roaming when I receive an SMS saying I should pay a fixed fee per day instead they were insisting to bill me 100 SEK per KB of data, which by the way if anyone is aware of the European directive on roaming is against the law. On another instance I used my 4G services to watched the olympic games, then Telia told me I exceeded my data limit and need to pay additional fee to keep the fast data access. Well I signed up paying for the most expensive service, but then again I got the slowest possible data service. So much for promises perhaps Gurol Kurt can explain how TeliaSonera is delivering its promises. I will be all ears.

Talking about promises, During the MWC Vodafone launch Vodafone xone with the slogan "Delivering the  promise". I would say its about time and looking forward to Fay Arjomandi and Michael Callas  delivering on that promise. Vodafone Xone is supposedly a social discovery mechanism, making things easier for you by discovering what you want and making those choices available… Much like the way google analytics work but hopefully no advertisements like the Music Genome Project. I like to simple services and stand by KISS.. More about that on my next post. For now I will have to figure how to get Radhika Sasidharan to provide me an access to CEM MEA telecom summit.

MWC what's next?

2014 Mobile World Congress is official over.. so what did we learn and what's next?

First off Samsung launched a new Smart phone, now the S5, making the one-year old S4 old... do we really want to change mobile phones every year? Why do you want to do that when you are only getting used to the phone.

Zuck of Facebook used the keynote address to justify that the price of WhatsApp... Hours after WhatsApp went out of service.

Lots of wellness and wearable stuff.. If you ask me the battle of the wearables in MWC was won by Fitbit.. their stand is always full of people, long queues of enthusiasts who wanted to try out the gadget.

Augmented reality haven't grown old. Despite the fact that the augmented reality hype died down long time ago, the upcoming devices like Google Glass is making it sexy again... Speaking of Google, they want to increase privacy by not letting others like Carrier IQ just collect customer data... now the question who actually collects the most data and monitors customer behavior on the net and sells that to advertisers?

Less and less people walk to visit the exhibition stands. Now is is bad news for exhibitors but good news for managing your time while you are there since most meetings are pre-arranged... Question is how do you like your MWC to be?

Measuring RoI of Customer Happiness...

Every sales or marketing or customer service or engineering initiatives has a cost and reward associated to it. For any company the rewards or benefits should outweigh the cost for it to be adopted by the company's' management. But what happens when it comes to customer experiences, are any short term benefits that can justify immediate implementation of a customer happiness program? Or its long term advantages and what is the most effective way of measuring Returns on Investments (RoI)?

In the financially driven world of business RoI is measured by

• Revenue generated
• Cost Saved
• Profit made

Having said that what is the best way in measuring the RoI of a CEM program? First off we need to understand why a CEM program is put in place... The general answer will always be to keep customer happy and satisfied. However beneath that very general statement are underlying business cases such as:

• Lower number of customer complains.  Just imagine every customer complain can cost say 5$ and if there are 1,000,000 complains avoided every year, that's a 5,000,000$ savings
• Lower the Average Call Handling Time. When calling customer service just imagine how much time is wasted going through the IVR then a long interview with a customer service agent. What if you can reduce this by let's say 1 minute? In an average mobile operator the cost of a customer service call is around 1$ per minute, now consider the 1,000,000 complains where every call handling time is reduced by 1 minutes, that's a 1,000,000$ savings.. In the real world the savings can be as much as 10 minutes
• Improve First Call Resolution rate. For every customer service organization resolving customer issues at the very first instance they complain is very important. Let's just say it will cost 5$ per every complain that is not resolved by first line support so if all the 1,000,000 calls goes to 2nd line support that's a 5,000,000$ cost that can be saved if complains are resolve the first time around.
• Lower Churn rate. Let's just say out of those 1,000,000 callers, 2% churns or departs as customers. That's 20,000 customers, and let's just say they ARPU is 100$ per year that's 2,000,000$ in potential lost revenue saved.
• Increase service usage. Happy customers normally use more services. Let's say as a mobile operator you offer data services for 5$ per month with 1 GB of data, with your customers being happy say about 1,000,000 customers upgrade to 10$ a month. That's an additional revenue of 120,000,000$ per year.
• Deploy wanted services. What a good CEM program will show you are future services that your customers will take. Let's just say your customers move to WiFi every time they use Facebook, now if you know this fact why not offer your subscriber a 1$ a month Facebook usage using your network. For 1,000,000 users who will subscribe to the service that's an additional revenue of 12,000,000$ per year.

There are of course a lot more potential savings and more potential revenue generated with the right solution. Having said that there will be more examples to learn from in Dubai for the CEM Summit  next month. This same topic will be discussed by David Perrota  of Zain, Liz McSorley of Du, Nedal Mostafa of Ufone and Ahmed El-Bana of Mobily.

This group of industry experts will be exploring:

• How to you use the results of your ROI analysis to make the customer experience a strategic priority at a time when all departments are competing for budget?
• How to you monitor and strengthen the link between customer satisfaction, recommendation rates and customer acquisition?
• How to you ensure that your customer experience improvements will increase ARPU?

Now I am tempted to attend....

Embedding the customer in the center of our organizations

In a world where product differentiation is no longer an advantages it is very important that an organization differentiates in how good it delivers the promised customer services.  Most customers today are expecting only the very best service, even if that price for service is dirt cheap. Let's say I dine in an Island in the Philippines, I pay 10$ for an excellent meal coupled with an excellent friendly service so if I dine in London and spends 100$ I will expect the same level of service. If I don't get a good service I might not come back again or might give a bad rating for the place in Yelp or any other social channels. You see I am not the only one with this way of thinking. Do you think the same? Talking of London, I have been to Nobu and to Ramsey's I was surprise to spend less in Ramsey's where the service was a lot better and the food was excellent… Now I can say that Ramsey's is a very good example of providing a wonderful customer service, you leave happy and want to be back again as soon as you can.

All customer experiences are rooted to the people who provides them. When it comes to businesses, the customer experience is all that matters, most specially on service industries like Telecom. So the question to most if not all executives is "How do you embed customer centricity in your organizations?". There is no easy answer to this, there are no shortcuts. Its true that we train our front line staff to deliver a good service, but delivering a good service is no longer just a service, it is giving a positive experience that counts. To ensure that we provide positive experiences, our customers expects us to take the extra mile, go a bit further to give them delight and happiness. Doing should not break the bank either, after all as a business we aim for profitability and as executives we are judge on profitability by our shareholders. In April, at the CEM Summit in Dubai, Liz McSorley of du (VP  Customer Experience) will share how they do it in du.

For a product and technology led company like AmanziTel, we ensure that customer centricity is embedded in our corporate DNA by ensuring that each and every one of us understand and embrace customer centricity and the importance of ensuring happiness to our customers. We do this in various ways

• Customer centricity starts from the top, from our board members to our CEO down to our software developers.

• We hire resources who are naturally service and innovation oriented, so no matter how difficult our deployments get we continue to strive to provide happiness to each and everyone of them.

• It is embedded in our product and service design. When we design a product, especially new innovations and ground breaking product, in every decision we take our customer needs and happiness are taken into consideration. We call that customer driven development.

• We treat every customer request with utmost care and respect. Its like having your own baby being born when customer request arrives and ensuring that he or she is always happy and that he or she is raised and developed the right way.

• In times when we are not perfect, we ensure that we make up for our shortcomings by continuously delighting our customers in our own little ways and make that extra effort.. Walk the extra mile…

• We empower our front line resources to make key decisions in delivering customer happiness when they are put on those awkward situations.

• We always keep in mind that our customers are serving Billions of subscribers that at the end of the day each of our customers will have to deliver that happiness to their billions of subscribers

• For each and every one of us in the company we will always ensure our customer's happiness in our own little ways

And since its Valentine's day let me say we love our customers and we love the billions of subscribers they have.

CEM Awards - Telecoms, last chance to nominate your favorites

At the end of March  prestigious awards will be given to deserving individuals, teams or organizations who excel in promoting and providing superior customer experiences. This award on excellence in Customer Experience Management will be handed during the CEM Telecom Middle East Summit in Dubai. There are several categories which you can nominate your favorite entries:

 Like any award there are criteria:

Best CEM Brand I think should go to a company who give the best impression of proving excellent Customer Experiences, where their brand alone echos of satisfied customers. Of course winners are not up to me but a group of judges  

--> from the CMO Council Middle East, Peppers & Rogers and First Gulf Bank. So I will be submitting my entries but not going to tell you who I am nominating :-D but definitely not SAS and not Apple Store in Helsingborg, Sweden. 

How are you giving happiness to your customers?

While in London I got to observe how we in the Telco industry perceive improving experiences though better service delivery, improved processes and consistency in varying channels. In the beginning of April there is another CEM for Telecoms Summit tin Dubai, organized by IQPC. As you see the Middle East is a perfect example as to where customer experience should be improve by more importantly give telco customers a better way to connect with customer service by eliminating waiting time. Next time you call a customer service number,  or join a customer service chat, why not demand not to wait? And demand that the customer service representative not ask you tons of questions but tell you directly how to fix problems you experienced?

One thing telco customers will never see or experience with their service providers are the bad and rude services provided by SAS. I flew an SAS flight to London, not only the flight attendants were very rude but also the cabin seals came off during landing. On the way back to Copenhagen, its the same constant experience.. The cabin crew is very rude. At least SAS consistently give you a very bad experience… I think they should send their customer experience representatives to a CEM Summit to learn a thing  or to on how mobile operators are providing delight to their customers.

As an ordinary consumer, are we able to bring delight to others and at the same time bring happiness to ourselves? Last week we were exploring Augmented Reality, some brought the idea forwards, after several days of discussions a product concept is born, a few weeks from now I assume it will be released publicly. Once it is released anyone of us can manipulate reality the way we always wanted it, not just to impress our friends but more importantly bring happiness to others who are beneficiaries of this augmented reality. Just imagine making someone smile by including them on an exhilarating experience you are having…. Or let them experience the joy you are currently experiencing and then share it on social media real time.

What's the best way to measure network experiences? Should you be concern as a subscriber?

This week I am attending the CEM in Telecoms and was in a panel discussing the best way to measure network experiences. Is there really a best way to measure what a subscriber experienced while interacting with the network? I am most familiar with the mobile network so let me share that that... There are several ways to measure network experiences such as

• Network traces and recordings. All your interaction as a subscriber is recorded in the network, whether you have agreed with your mobile operator or not to record your interactions.
• Probes and DPIs. Same as in network recordings your interaction are recorded whether you like it or not, but more importantly all your usage information (user plane) are also recorded such as which websites have you visited, which applications you used, etc
• Device agents. This are applications either embedded or native that runs on your device and records your network interaction. In an embedded application like the default monitoring system device manufacturers employ or the one from Carrier IQ you are not able to opt-in, meaning you have no choice but to be recorded. In native application you can opt-in or opt-out much like you do with WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook, etc.
• Drive test. This does not actually measure your actual network experience but it tries to simulate your usage of the network.

All monitoring  involving the network are done discretely, meaning without the subscriber knowing it. What ever the mobile network operator does with this recording is their own choice, or what ever the person who has access to this recording do is his or her own choice. In a way this measure how good or bad your experiences are based on a the networks perspective. Although it does not care whether you have a bad or good experience.

Device based measurement I think is the best way to measure actual network experiences, but it should be on a native level meaning individual subscribers can choose whether they want their experiences measured or not. On the device all experiences a subscriber have is measured even his or her own perception of the experience. Let's take the classic and annoying dropped call, as a subscriber when a phone call is terminated unexpectedly it is dropped call. In the network if a call is terminated unexpectedly but not seen as abnormal then it is is not a dropped call. Ever wonder why when you complained of a bad quality the mobile network operator seem not to care?

At the end of March there is a CEM event in Dubai organized by IQPC, one of the topics being discussed is  "how can a service provider use the experiences of their subscriber to reduce operational cost."  Now this makes most sense since mobile operators are actually having a benefit in knowing what you experienced as a subscriber instead of simply storing it. It should be very interesting to listen to experts on what they think.

Apple is losing its edge in delivering a good customer experience at Apple Stores

Last weekend I was at the Apple Store in Väla centrum, in my home town of Helsingborg in Southern Sweden with 3 kids all wanting to buy apple products.  My previous experience at the Apple Store when they just opened was chaotic, store employees that are chatting with each other instead of helping customers and payment systems that does not work. OK that was the opening day, I can cut Apple some slack with the 20 minute wait. Apple Stores used to be the model of very good customer experiences but now I have that questioned… even the Phone House store on the same shopping complex now offer a better experience.

Back to last weekend… getting into the store the first thing kids did  is go after the iPads on display and starts exploring. Great.. Two kids less to manage… but my daughter who is desperate to buy a replacement iPhone charger is very desperate so she went around the entire shop looking for the right item. I quietly observed a  few feet away. No Apple Store personnel approached her or greeted her, or not even me… we seem to be invisible to so many Apple store employees as usual chatting to each other and busy looking down their own iPads.

10 minutes later my daughter found the items she wanted and looking around for someone to help.. I did the same, had eye contact with 4 employees in the Store but all immediately avoided my gaze.. Is there something wrong with trying to buy something? Another 10 minutes later we were still waiting, clearly frustrated  I went to approach an employee who is fiddling with his iPad, and saw he is playing a game.. A Game while working on a Apple Store! Are they all playing games on their iPads now instead of attending to customers? Is that the new Apple mantra? After another 10 minutes of coaxing an Apple Store employee about paying for the item we were finally out of the shop… In total I wasted 45 minutes in an Apple Store just to buy an iPhone charger…  Well Apple missed potential sales of 2 iPhone 5S and an iPad Air with the other 2 kids since we did not want to wait longer for Apple Store employees to provide any form of service.

With this bad experience on the same Apple Store I can only say that Apple is now on a death spiral. They lost their edge, they lost their customer experience edge. I will go back to that store in a few weeks just to check and verify how bad is Apple's customer service spiraling down… If it's an isolated incident on this particular Apple Store then Apple better put its act together on this store since they are losing customer. Last  weekend Väla was busy but Apple Store is empty.. Something that never happens in other Apple Stores I have seen on a busy day in the mall.

Talking about Customer Experience Edge there is a book "The Customer Experience Edge", its well written and good insight on delivering excellent customer experience from RoI to actual satisfaction of delivering excellent customer Service. At the end of March in Dubai the CEM Telecom Summit is going to take place where topics on how to improve customer experiences are going to discussed and lessons learned in various programs are to be presented. Its a very good one to attend even if you are not in the Telco industry since there are technologies that can used outside Telco…. Remember that the hardest customer to please are Telco customers, its not only the service delivered, or the product sold but the overall experience from choosing a phone or tablet to the right subscriptions to the actual experience when using voice and data services and using the device it self….

On "Customer Experience Management in Telcoms: Middle East Summit" One things catches my attention immediately upon looking at the brochure….The topic goes "How do you improve the customer experience of your high value customers to maximize revenue generation".  Delivering Excellent Customer Experience is not always about revenue generation, it is about excellent experience and the value or Returns of Investments it brings.  I would argue that it is better to look at it as Returns of Investments than maximizing revenue. Think of this, with bad customer experience your customers will go away… Putting the  an effective customer experience program should keep customers but the main should be delivering excellent service and not maximizing revenue… while the correct metric to see use in determine success of that program is returns of investment and not necessarily revenue. Do you agree?

Zappos is a very good example. They deliver WOW and by delivering WOW they in return become very profitable… the WOW delivered turns into TRUST and that trust into ADVOCACY thus not only increasing their revenues but also their profits.. More importantly they aim for an excellent customer experience and high profitability comes as an additional benefit. Can your company deliver WOW to your customers?

Customer Experience in Telecoms

Being in China last week give me glimpse how fast Customer Experience programs are being rolled-out in the country. This I can lay claim to while observing one of our customer deployments  (server failed, alarms everywhere, engineers panicked, solved with only 3 minutes downtime) where a single Customer IQ server receives more than 800,000 files per day and growing, this means that the update can be as much as 800,000 devices in that day or it can also be 800,000 customer complains to the operator in a single day… Hopefully for that customer, the largest operator in the world, its the former and not the later… On my way back to Nordics I can't help but think about what we in the western world term as big data, how much we stress about meeting big data requirements…. Comparing to China perhaps experiences from 800,000 mobile devices in a day is not yet considered as big data when they have 800,000,000 subscribers…. Seems like our deployment has room to grow still before we can join the Billion subscriber club….

I have been asked a few times to speak on a conference or to blog about an event and while searching for meaningful conference to attend to I stumbled upon CEM in Telecoms Middle East Summit. And after discussions with IQPC's Radhika Sasidharan I agreed to be part of the event. One things that entice me to be part of it are the line up of speakers and the topics being discussed. I attended the event as speaker last year and at the same time as one of the sponsors.. Back then Telecom operators were trying to learn from other verticals such as airports, banks and hotels… A Year later its now very focused in to the Telecoms market. So the trend in the Middle East is similar to Asia where the  subscribers base of our  customers using the Customer IQ solution have exceeded more than a Billion considering the size of the operators we work with.

The CEM in Telecoms MEA will be in Dubai, the melting pot of culture and businesses at the end of March. I am very much looking forward to be there to see the progress that du have achieved with Osman Sultan (CEO, du) talking about how customer centricity starts at the top. Graham Webster of Telefonica will also be sharing how Telfonica O2 managed to engage their subscribers emotionally while Gurul Kurt will be presenting a case study in TeliaSonera about delivering on customer promises. Its going to be an exciting spring in Dubai…. And like last year perhaps I can catch some snow and skiing on the way back to the Nordics after the warm spring in Dubai….

Speaking of the Nordics, I won't make my flight to Norway today so enjoy the snow in Sweden and   contemplate on how customer experiences can be improved in one Nordic operator. Let's see.. how should I do that?