How to Improve Customer Experience in the Digital Age

Overlooking subscribers' need for more than speed and a consistent experience management contributes to this industry's large number of customer complaints.

Fig: Type of Customer Contacts - Broadband (Source: By Gautam Borah; Compiled from various websites) So what we can expect in customer experience management in the next few years, specifically in relation to broadband? The list below combines current research with my field experience. The trends are industry agnostic and likely to impact all businesses irrespective of the industry they belong to.

Powerful and choosy customers emerge
The basic ingredients of customer requirements can be termed "Right" (aka product), "Now" (or time to deliver or recover) and "Free" (or cost). Digital technologies will push the boundaries of customer requirements faster than ever.

Customization, individualization will be key
Once customers are choosy because they have so many options, businesses must shift to individualization and customization. This is similar to what I call the "patient model," where each person in a medical center requires different types of medical care based on their specific health needs.

Providers must focus on simplification
How many times have you contacted a WhatsApp call center? (Do they have one?) WhatsApp is one of the best examples of a problem-free product, a tool that's so simple a customer never has to contact the developer with questions about the product. That's where companies all need to be, including service providers.

Customer service, not product, determines brand choice
Increasingly, customers will select a particular brand depending on the quality of service provided. Consumers are placing more importance on customer service, a trend expected to grow, according to the most recent American Express Global Customer Service Barometer.

Strong need for real-time experience
The new consumer journey is shifting from sessions to spurts -- or what Google has referred to as micro-moments. This will emerge as the new battleground for brands to Be There, Be Useful and Be Quick. Micro-moment victories will depend on an organization's creation of relevant, personalized real-time experience at the right instant.

Adopting an integrated framework
It has become imperative for firms to create customer experiences that are fast and easy to adopt. This means that an organization can't deliver customer experience in broken pieces. It demands an integrated model, not picking up pieces in traditional discrete areas.

The Customer Experience Management Excellence (or CEMEX) 9c3i framework delineated below is an integrated framework that I formulated based on rigorous industry research, discussion with experts and application with success.

Building a CX framework
The framework I propose works on the following premises:

• Customer experience needs to be created across a lifecycle
• The objectives are the opportunities to create a stream of experiences at various points within the lifecycle culminating in
• crescendos, where cstomers experience the maximum delight)
• Defined interfaces with internal functions provide the impetus to a seamless experience
• The accelerator of the framework is an analytics system
• A the base of the model are people (capability and engagement)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in the article are the author's and don't reflect the views of anyone else, including the organization he is working for.)

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• M&As Consolidate India's Telco Market
• BBWN Radio: How to Virtualize the Subscriber Experience

— Gautam Borah, who is vice president of customer operations at Vodafone India, is author of the book, Monetising Innovation. His personal website is www.gautamborah.com and you can follow him on Twitter @gautamkborah .