Customer Experience is Your User Story. Have You Read it Before Publishing it?

Customer Experience, or CX, is not just a buzzword but the new currency many telecom providers invest in. Its importance in the telecom industry cannot be overstated.

The transformation of CX is not a challenge that any company can swiftly overcome, especially not the telecom providers, who were once notorious for bill shocks that reverberated for years. However, this negative reputation has significantly dissipated, marking a remarkable evolution in the industry's approach to customer experience and instilling a sense of optimism about the future.

Customer experience is the art of engendering desired emotions, outcomes, and choices throughout the customer journey, from the moment of discovery until the final moment of departure.

Customer experience design is a proactive process that begins long before the customer's first interaction with the company. It spans multiple channels and 'moments of truth, 'requiring the full attention of top executives, including the CEO, CMO, and CSO. This proactive approach ensures that the customer's journey is carefully crafted and optimized for their benefit.

Viewing the entire customer journey as a storyboard is crucial. It prevents a reactive approach to customer support and care resilience. This oversight could have been avoided if the User Story had been reviewed before publication, highlighting the importance of a comprehensive approach to customer support.

Here is a typical example of a User Story that sheds light on the experience a customer will face, especially at critical moments of truth, which might sound familiar to the industry experts

Discovery Phase:

Zaid, our potential customer, will be aware of the new product while watching YouTube videos, scrolling his Instagram photos and on his way to work as his eyes gaze upon the lamp posts. The timing of these advertising activities will coincide with our launch of THREE other campaigns, which will run simultaneously, not to mention the big national event with its massive online and outdoor coverage.

[Note] In a typical scenario, we choose not to state most of the realities surrounding our product launch because we either did not consider it or feel helpless against those circumstances to cater to their presence.

Interest and Search Phase:

Zaid, our potential customer, watched the entire ad on YouTube, which had a call to action of "Visit our website for more details" or "Visit our Business Centers." We were very considerate and added a link to purchase the product directly; the product link highlights the unique selling points or USPs and will guide our customers in a step-by-step approach to activate the product successfully. The step-by-step approach comprises SEVEN steps with an expected time to process of 10 minutes if things go okay and the backend system does not disconnect, which we know it usually does, as per our complaints records. If the customer loses interest or faces an issue and doesn't continue, we will reach out to him within 24 hours, as the first step is capturing the customer's contact details.

If Zaid chose to visit our Business Center, he would have to wait for an average of 15 minutes before a sales representative could serve him, or if Zaid were a tech-savvy person, he would use the self-service kiosks and go through a TEN steps screens like so, which we estimate that will take 10 minutes of his time. He must wait for an agent to help if he gets stuck somewhere.

Onboarding and Activation Phase:

Zaid has to provide THREE or FOUR documents, which people usually only carry with them occasionally, but we made sure in the terms and conditions written in fine print that he must bring them along. If, unfortunately, he misses any, we will send him back home until he returns, and we will not record such a transaction for follow-up.

Once Zaid successfully activates his product, we will send him all the relevant details, along with a dozen generic messages that we need to send for corporate or regulatory purposes, so he will end up with ten different messages. But there is nothing to worry about, as we also sent the link to the product's webpage that has all the details he might need, which eventually will be removed once we launch our following product, which by then we assume and will work on moving him to it. We can't serve and support old products and services indefinitely, right? Customer care agents will have it in their knowledge center, which currently has hundreds of old and present products.

The customer journey doesn't end here, but I read your User Story before publishing it. The management can easily detect many issues by simply reading the FULL STORY and not just the highlights of the specific product intended to be launched.

Customer experience (CX) transformation is pivotal for telecom operators, especially when customers have experienced what digital native players like Apple, Amazon, and Netflix can do for them. It is a daunting task that requires patience but can be done in iterations; most executives fall into the pitfall of "Let's Fix it All Now" and end up with an exhausted team that achieves mediocre milestones.

Your customer story is more than a product specification and campaign that runs in isolation from everything else in the customer's world. Before publishing the User Story, please read it and bring value to your customers, shareholders, and staff.

Written by Abdelfattah Al Masri

Grammarly AI was used to process the original text