by Shaun Smith
‘The Customer Experience Workshop helped us to create alignment around the direction. That was, I think, the start of it all. Obviously we did some thinking before that, but the first thing we wanted to do was to wake people up a bit; to show them a mirror, and say, “If you were a customer why would you choose UPC or any other Liberty Global brand?” We showed the executives that we didn’t have a clear differentiation; we didn’t have a clear vision. So we created the need, and they asked us to help them.
We mentioned the concept of ‘loose/tight’. Most organizations are very ‘tight’ when it comes to telling operating units and their people what to do and how to do it but very ‘loose’ when it comes to ‘What do we stand for? What kind of experience do we wish to provide? What do we promise?’ Our philosophy is to reverse these two so that what you stand for as a brand and why it is important are clearly spelled out – as is the kind of experience you wish your customer to have, but how it is implemented is left to the front line to figure out. This avoids the robotic ‘Have a nice day’ behaviour that you see in so many organizations. Michel Pilet used this very approach when thinking about marketing campaigns:
‘We really had to think from a country perspective because we know our businesses are the ones executing marketing and operations locally and our business model was decentralized. For me, it was more about supporting them. For instance, we created a booklet that was based on our research in several markets. Luckily the research showed that there were not big differences between markets, so we could follow a common approach to our brand promise and experience. We can’t standardize delivery and we don’t need each country to do exactly what other markets do.
‘The nice thing about it is we can see if a programme has success in one market, and if it does we can try to leverage that into other markets to move more towards a consistent approach where possible. For example, I think it is inevitable that we need to include all channels to deliver the full experience and that experience needs to be aligned across all channels. We hardly do any social media, for instance, but it is on the list this year. It may be part of a bigger plan, to see how we need to operate as a business brand. I think, as we become more and more differentiated, and bigger, we have an opportunity to differentiate from the other parts of the business also. When something fails in the B2B market the customer wants immediate help because their business is their lifeline. Their broadband is not just for a television programme they are watching, they need it in order to do business, and so the impact of service disruptions is way bigger in business than in consumer. And then, obviously, the more diverse the clients and their needs, the more dedicated and tailored solutions they require.
Writers such as Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan have argued that the hardest part of strategy is the execution.1 We agree. Getting your people to behave differently is vital, but how can you do that? We advocate what we call ‘Branded Customer Experience Training’ – that is, training that brings alive the brand promise and experience for your people. As Vanessa Hamilton described it in Chapter 7, it is more holistic, experiential and leader-led. Erik Wiechers realized that this would be key and so took an innovative approach to communicating the desired experience and new behaviours to his people:
‘The most difficult part for me personally and for my staff is how to you make sure the strategy is delivered. My guys and I are all academically trained, we can grasp the idea, but how do you make sure your strategy lands with the front line? How do you change their behaviour for good, so they understand this is the best thing for them and the customer, and the shareholder?
‘We’ve got 27 moments in the SOHO (Small Office Home Office) customer journey, and at a certain point in time you need to dramatize this for all your staff so they understand it. So, we had 27 people lined up on stage, each responsible for one touchpoint. So, for example, the first person said, “I’m Sarah, I’m responsible for orientation in the SOHO journey, and especially on the landing page; my responsibility is this, and this is how I will make a difference to our customers”, and so on for each touchpoint along the journey. It was very visual, very committing; it created one group feeling, working for one customer. There were 27 people lined up on that stage, each committed to make the UPC customer journey unique, and that is what we are all about.
‘The nice thing about this company is that we have white-collar and blue-collar workers and they all participated in suggesting ideas as to how to make a difference for the customer. It’s their customer journey and they really feel personally committed to improving it. We gave dinner vouchers for people contributing great ideas. We also have a 10-day call, so one of our call-centre agents will give you a call, and ask, “How did the installation go? Is there anything we can learn? How was your experience?” And that really works well. As a result, our NPS has really gone through the roof.’
Measure
There has been much debate over recent years with a number of different metrics and methods vying for dominance: NPS, Customer Effort, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) and many others. Our view is that there is no one metric that works for everyone – so we prefer to build a scorecard that draws on both lagging and leading, soft and hard, customer and employee measures. However, at the end of the day it is what is most important for the organization that determines the measure of success, and we try to identify this early on and focus our efforts on moving the needle on it. We try to identify the key metric(s) as part of the customer experience workshop but then build a scorecard of all of the primary business, experience and employee indicators prior to implementation so that there is a solid benchmark to evaluate success against. For UPC this was very clear. NPS and the number of contacts were the most important as early indicators that the customer intimacy strategy was working:
‘The main metrics are transactional and relational NPS along with contacts per year per customer; together they measure the amount of effort put in by our customers.
‘Obviously we want to relate those to churn and customer lifetime value and we are starting to see the first sign of improvements there, being able to correlate data in some markets now.
‘At the moment we are still very transactional, moving from –33 in NPS to now being a positive NPS figure. Now that we are at an acceptable level we can really impact churn and loyalty. We started this journey two years ago and it takes at least two years to really start tracking churn, because customers are in contracts. As I said, results are becoming visible, detractors are dropping and promoters increasing, and we are starting to see a correlation with churn. The plan over the next six months is to really see the impact of churn as compared to two years ago.’
Erik Wiechers was clear that a leading indicator of NPS was employee satisfaction. We agree with him. Those of you familiar with the ‘service profit chain’ will know that there is a strong cause-and-effect relationship between employee satisfaction, customer satisfaction and business results (for more on this see Joe Wheeler’s piece on the service profit chain in Chapter 8):
‘If you want to have loyal customers you first need to make sure your employees are happy. Five years ago we had an employee satisfaction level below 6; we’re roughly at 7.6 now and we have an employee loyalty score of 8.6, which is unique in our industry. My thesis is that only with loyal employees can you make loyal customers; that’s the basis of everything. So, that was what we did. And through that and through the customer journey, our NPS really went up, and then our operational cash flow increased, and then I had even more money to invest in the programme. So, I learned, improve your employee satisfaction and increase customer satisfaction, which lead to higher operational cash flow. The reason for this is less churn and, second, more up-sell moments. Those are the financial whys; and the third one, for me personally, is that it feels a lot better, having fun in your job, and really making customers happy. It shouldn’t be only financially driven. Your employees are happy if they can make happy customers.’
Figure 12.1 Keep measuring the implementation
Ultimately, of course, any business that is responsible to shareholders has to show business results. Chris Coles joined in 2014 as managing director to replace Frans-Willem de Kloet, who has continued his career within the Liberty Global family as the managing director of Czech Republic. Whenever there is a leadership transition of this type there is a danger of the initiative going ‘off the rails’ as people wait with baited breath to find out what the new direction will be. Fortunately, Chris shares the very same philosophy as Frans-Willem, and by focusing on showing results Soraya had sufficient ammunition to convince Chris right away that this was the correct and only direction to continue. So much so that Chris told us:
‘In the business-market space we are seeing signs of success, both in terms of improving NPS, customer effort scores and customer satisfaction scores. There is a variety of metrics that one can pick from. We have chosen NPS and I think it’s serving us well thus far and we can see marked improvement as well as see improved acquisition results. In most markets we are the challenger so we are typically taking share. The question is: have we bent the acquisition curve more in order to get market share faster? Early results would say we are. Are we able to isolate it to one or two discrete variables or economic? We’re working on it and the first signs are there and, yes, we’re certainly seeing positive results and we attribute a good bit of that to the way in which we’re approaching the market.’
Innovate
So results help, but you have to keep moving forwards in order to reap the long-term benefits and also maintain your lead over competitors. The best thing that you can do is to continually reaffirm your vision and brand purpose. That becomes the compass that guides you through the inevitable turbulent waters of any large corporate organization.
This is where ‘stand firm’ helps. Creating a culture that is aligned with the direction is vital, as are constantly challenging your performance and asking how it can be improved.
Soraya sums up this need very well:
‘Our biggest challenge – and it’s probably true for a lot of companies out there – is our short-term financially driven financial culture. We are a very financial-driven company and that is why we are so successful. Keeping in mind this longer-term strategy and making sure that you keep everyone on board, although you cannot show the financial impact immediately, is the biggest challenge. I think we are very successful in doing that but we need to stay focused, repeating the message every time, everywhere. It goes back to our purpose and our belief. Building on belief and evangelizing are key, I think, and a very bold move in a corporate organization. Now that we are seeing clear results to back that belief obviously helps in focus and investments.
‘The plan going forward is to build out more programmes, copy more proven results from one market to the other, but mainly track results, tracking churn and showing that it helps our long-term success. Finally, going back to where we started this conversation, we are a people business, so sustaining success by hiring the right people. By that I mean people with the right attitude towards customers.’
Innovation is not always about being better; it is sometimes about being different. Doing more of the same may prove to be an unworthy investment, so as your customer experience initiative matures, it is worth revisiting your ‘ECG’ and questioning where you should invest in innovating the experience. Erik Wiechers puts the case for this very clearly:
‘We were at minus 40 NPS when we started the project, and we’re now at zero. The question, though, is do we want to go for plus 20? If our competitors are still at minus 20 do we invest in improving to plus 20 or might it be better, perhaps, to invest in a new customer gateway? So, that is the balance we need to strike between sustaining competitive advantage and levels of investment.’
The other critical point in a customer experience journey is knowing when to hand-off the initiative from the corporate functions to the operating units. Too early and you lose some of the synergy and best-practice thinking, too late and you risk it becoming wholly owned by a corporate function and failing to gain traction at the local level. Erik summed it up by saying:
‘Our customer journey is a programme, but at a certain point you need to hand it over to the operation; when exactly should the cut-over moment happen? We had a long-lasting discussion about it and agreed that, for us, the cut-over moment is as soon as the programme manager has operationalized it in such a way that it is measurable, then he or she will hand it over to the director of that specific department. And then the second challenge is, “Whose responsibility is it to come up with new innovations?” Is that the programme director, or is it the operational unit? As with most answers in life, it is a hybrid, so it needs to be stimulated by what we see in the field, but at the same time the programme manager needs to be a thought leader and provide stimulus to the operating units.’
But what role should corporate functions play in this case? The answer is to take a broader perspective on the business, to observe the latest trends and what customers are seeking, to innovate new approaches and technology and then to facilitate the conversation with the operating units to introduce it. Chris Coles sees the task this way:
‘Our purpose should be to both solve the current needs of our local markets and customers and introduce them to new solutions that are coming down the pipe that are probably going to solve some of their developing needs. A lot of it comes just by watching industry trends and buying behaviour, and how technology and solutions become adopted. Having a customer representative in our corporate environment is a crucial role to us, we are not in contact with customers every day, someone needs to keep us honest and thinking about the customer. Our job is to make sure that we’re there as a quiet partner in the process.
‘What we try to do is to get folks to step back from the day-to-day and to think about it in that context, because it goes a lot better if you wake up in the morning energized by what you’re doing. If you have a line of sight to how the customer is going to experience what you have done that day, or what you are contributing to the process – and keep that paramount – it should help to simplify some of the other dynamics in your day: the frustrations, the politics, the interpersonal challenges that are there in any business, big or small, start-up or large corporate.’
Results
At the time of writing, Liberty Global Business Services have seen significant improvements in their customer experience and year-on-year NPS. Looking at the three ‘hallmark’ touchpoints, we see NPS has increased +5 points for ‘buy’, +17 points for ‘get help’ and +8 points for ‘relational’ and, from Liberty Global’s own research, improving NPS has a clear impact on reducing churn.
Figure 12.2 Liberty Global monetization strategy
Advice for other leaders
We asked the Liberty Global Business Services team to share their insights and advice to others embarking on a similar journey. We thought that it would be interesting to conclude their story with their top tips:
‘Keeping a clear vision is really key and our role in leadership is both to keep in touch with market sentiment, as well as to help play it back into the business, because most people are not on the front line and yet their roles impact the front line and may not be appreciated. We want to make sure they understand that what they do does, in fact, matter.’
(Chris Coles)
‘What I really learned in the past two years was to broaden my perspective a bit. You need to understand where other people are coming from. People may be more financially driven, or have a different background or different targets, so you need to convince them in a different way. You need to show results. The boldest thing we have done is going ahead with this strategy, this direction, while the parent company had a different philosophy. Liberty Global is a very financially driven organization, and we decided to say, we need to achieve results, however, we want to achieve them
differently. To stand up and say, “This is who we want to be.” I think that took some guts.’
(Michel Pilet)
‘My tip for the future of customer experience is this: it’s the “super promoter”. We spend a lot of time getting all the customers scoring 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. I think it’s easier, cheaper and more effective to make the ‘super promoters’ – the nines and tens – really work for you, because they are your brand advocates and, at the end of the day, that is what we all want.’
(Erik Wiechers)
‘My advice to companies choosing this strategy is to really spend time on the “why”. What is the purpose of your organization? I believe that whether you talk about individuals or you talk about organizations you have to be authentic, otherwise it is not going to be believed. You really need to think about the culture of the organization, to ask “Where are we coming from? What are our values?” From that, create a message that resonates because it is authentic. So first of all you need to create the “why” – and it’s something you need to spend a lot of time on, to think it through and chew on it almost. And then you have to be bold and stand up for what you believe in and not get deviated from your original thinking.’
(Frans-Willem de Kloet)
‘Start with building the belief. The road is so clear now, no one is asking questions, we are operating as one team and that is a big plus. Follow up with a clear strategy and execution plan that is understandable for everyone in the organization and track results. That is really what has made us successful. And it’s working. Based on the voice of our customers, they can feel the difference! Looking back I will never change the approach again.’