Yesterday, I attended an insightful session lead by Andrew Baer, SVP Comms and Media Industry of Salesforce, which covered the business opportunities and the real-world successes of a customer experience transformation in the Communications Service Provider industry. Here are the highlights
Core to a positive customer experience is that customers expect simpler experiences.
The four dimensions to a simpler experience:
- Know me (example Amazon)
- Give me control (example Fitbit). Customer decides how to interact
- Help me as a team (example Apple)
- Adapt to my situation (example Uber)
A key concept in Customer Experience transformation is the Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS measures customer loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships and represents to the likelihood of a customer to remain a customer for a longer period of time, buy more services and recommend services to friends. The average NPS score in the CSP industry is 6 (on a scale from -100 to 100). This is low compared to new entrants with NPS scores of 70+ and illustrates a significant revenue opportunity for CSPs.
Salesforce helps improve CSPs NPS scores because it was designed from the ground up as platform for intelligent customer engagement including Omni channel, predictive analytics and 360 view of customer across all channels and lines of business. Additionally, salesforce ecosystem industry frameworks and data models can help businesses accelerate their customer experience transformation.
A key take-away from the session is that this customer experience transformation built on the Salesforce platform is more than a vision. Significant business result successes are in production today at both Virgin Media and Sky Italia. The highlighted Virgin Media success story focused on improved prospect to customer conversion rates.
The foundational elements of their success are 360 view of all customer interactions across all channels (retail, direct, telesales, venue, online) and a tiered approach to minimize order abandonment:
- Customer email
- Customer email with offer
- Outbound telesales
- Field sales.
The business results achieved include 11% conversion of inbound leads sold by outbound telesales, 6% uplift on shopping cart abandonment and 40% better conversion using Salesforce leads versus Business as Usual. Sky Italia summarized their success to date, active and future plans for their customer experience transformation based on Salesforce and the industry cloud provider Vlocity.
