Craig’s Journey
19 year old Craig from New York is hunting down a patch to solve an upgrade problem with his Android phone. He’s tried T-Mobile customer service but gave up after the rep referred him back to the manufacturer claiming they didn’t support his OS anymore.
He shows me a list of forum posts he’s scanning through in response to an earlier request. One poster suggests he phone T-Mobile with a set of specific technical requests. He calls the service center once more, half in conversation with the call center automaton in Delhi and half scanning frantically through the forum posts and Google searches.
“It’s pretty lame,” says Craig, “nobody I call seems to either know how to deal with it or want to to deal with it.”
I ask Craig how he intends to resolve the issue.
“Myself,” he smiles wryly, “I only phone the call center if I absolutely have to. It’s never the first option for me.”
Craig aborts the call center and fires off a volley of texts to friends. His Customer Experience journey continues, outside of the control of the mobile industry.
New Paradigms for Service
As we enter the Age of Discovery, the mobile business is slowly waking up that retention is the new acquisition. When Craig was the first in his class to own the Motorola Droid, he was actively trying to convert his friends away from their feature phones. mobileYouth research shows that 62% of youth handset purchases are based on what youth say to each other, not what creative agencies say. Loyal customers (like Craig once was) are responsible for the most recommendation.
In this article I look at the challenge facing mobile brands today and how they need to evolve their customer service models. Here is a 3-point summary of recommendations:
- The first step is in understanding the business case for customer service. Service is no longer a cost center but your best marketing strategy. To compete with a new set of market entrants who “get” service, mobile needs to spend less on advertising and more on service. How do mobile companies retain Craig’s business in the face of a new, leaner competitor who excels at customer service?
- Getting customer service doesn’t mean going “self-serve” and outsourcing the lot to computers and India. It means moving from a one-to-one model of customer experience to a many-to-many. How do we make the Customer Experience journey for Craig a positive rather than painful one. I explain these key concepts in the article.
- Many-to-many customer service needs to focus on the key change agents who will make it happen: Cashless Innovators like Craig. It’s this specific group of change agents who have played a pivotal historical role in addressing inefficient markets and making them good again. They also hold the key to the future of customer experience.
Every young person has a mobile phone (if not 2) so growth from here on in comes from going deeper rather than wider on existing relationships.
Increasingly, mobile companies are looking at customer service as a key component of their loyalty strategy and customer service. In the mobileYouth report we demonstrate how brands with the highest loyalty rates also grew the fastest, had the highest hit rates for new product launches and also had the most positive PR. Brands that advertised the most, however, had little impact on profitability.
Service = Loyalty = Profits
57% of youth, according to our research, avoid traditional customer service channels. They Google it, talk to friends or hang out at expert forums. They’ll do anything but call your call center and speak to one of your employees. Service impacts NPS and EMI scores for mobile brands: customers are 10% less loyal if they have to pick up the phone and speak to a rep.
As we enter the Age of Discovery, mobile brands face the ominous task of competing head on with new players that get the Social Business model – Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. These companies are better geared towards providing new service models that allow youth to get the support they want. So, how can mobile companies survive?
Survival = Less on Ad Agencies, More on Customer Service
Survival means getting the customer service model right. No longer is customer service a “cost center” but now potentially your best marketing strategy. The challenge facing mobile companies today is that, let’s be honest here, they’re not very good at service and it’s a whole lot easier to commit a few million dollars to a fun, funky advertising agency. What I’d like to put to you today is that, if mobile wants to compete with Facebook, Amazon and friends they need to spend less on ad agencies and more on service. Sure, it’s not going to win your creative agency awards but it will win you customers. Rather than trying to delight Craig with fun, fresh ad campaigns focus on reducing the pain points that force him away.
How Youth have redefined the mobile Customer Experience
Mobile is uniquely positioned in that everyone uses it which means the future of customer experience has a large base of innovation to draw from. I’m particularly interested in how youth have played a key role in shaping the experience over the last decade. I define “customer experience” here in the terms used by mobileYouth: Marketing, Innovation and Customer Service.
It was young people that redefined the music industry with Napster and file sharing later paving the way for the Apple iPod and iPhone to enter the market (Napster was invented by a 19 year old called Shawn Fanning). It was youth who also brought Facebook to the market (Zuckerberg was 19 when he set up Facemash). Youth have discovered a lot of things we haven’t given them credit for – Firefox, SMS, BBM being other examples. And it’s not just youth – it’s a specific segment you need to pay attention to – the Cashless Innovators. You see, if you consider where the money’s at in mobile – SMS, group messaging, video chat, apps like Facebook and music, you can pretty much credit Cashless Innovators for making all of these possible.
Cashless Innovators and the future of Customer Service
Which brings us to Customer Service. There are 2 ways the mobile industry can approach this domain. Here’s the more obvious roadmap which will inevitably be the wrong approach:
* Provide new service programmes to high-end users first
* Deploy self-service models that contain user interaction on a one-to-one basis
Let’s look at both of these statements:
High-end users first: Here is your cash cow market that is typically 35+ and intolerant of inconsistent products. Middle aged marketing execs are using BBM now only because it took 3 years for students to iron out the creases and foibles to get it working properly. The same could be said of Facebook and SMS. Ford is leveraging students like Craig to develop in-car apps for low end models like the Fiesta that can ultimately be deployed to its higher end portfolio. You see, the student market will happily absorb the risk that the high end users intolerant of.
Self-Service models: In a recent study by Corporate Executive Board, they found that a full 57% of inbound calls to a service center where from people who had tried to self-serve first. On this basis, you’d assume that self-serve was the way forward. But, there’s a catch. If service is about efficiency you’ll end up making self-service into a ticketing operation. It will be cheaper, more efficient but less effective. If service is about effectiveness – i.e. connecting people – you need to look at peer-to-peer service models. Verizon have employed this successfully. Even small companies like Threadless can employ effective many-to-many service models that connect customers with customers.
In the unsocial business model, customer service is a cost. We try to outsource it to Gurgaon or Manila and reduce costs. When people complain we retort “how else could we keep the prices this low?” In reality, for the customers themselves service can be a social benefit. Young people actually like helping each other. Go to any gaming or auto forum and see how resident experts gain social currency from helping out the “noobs”. The problem is that the organization gets in the way and tries to control the flow of interaction by creating a call center, a customer service script and driving interaction through de-motivated employees.
Summary
“It seems like every time I call these guys they wanna either get me off the phone or, like, keep me on there forever. Why can’t they just deal with it?” Craig slams down his Android phone half wishing he never bought the handset in the first place. “Jess [his girlfriend] never has this problem with her iPhone.”
Good customer service is about letting go.
It’s about stepping back and giving the key change agents tools to service the market. They are not only more motivated but often more qualified to do it than your own staff. It’s also about realizing the role of service within your business model. This isn’t about cutting costs but generating a powerful marketing strategy that creates Earned Media and recommendation that your ad agency could only dream of.
And the happy ending? After a long history as an Android users with T-Mobile, Craig emails me 2 weeks after our research project in the US comes to a close.
“Hi. Just an update to say I finally bit the bullet and bought an iPhone on Verizon. Jess kept going on about how stupid I was for choosing T-Mob so I gave up holding out. Anyway, I know T-Mob don’t listen to me but they read your research so I just want them to know that they lost a long time customer.”
Apple and Verizon didn’t spend a cent on advertising to Craig.
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