The mobile industry is successful, but dysfunctional, a customer services and marketing expert has said. old the industry at the recent MEX conference. The industry has had a big social impact but is profligate and its success has been circumstantial, Charlie Dawson, partner and founder of consultancy firm The Foundation said.
Dawson said that basic customer experience issues facing the industry, for example sales and call centre support, meant that operators need to “alter the expectation of the whole organisation.”
He exhorted mobile operators to become their own customers, not to trust their market research in isolation and to take the medicine they prescribe.
“If you can do that you may have some idea of the distance between what your customers actually experience and what your customer service teams and market research consultants tell you they experience,” he said.
Another expert said that a few years ago when he had worked with the board of Volkswagon UK, it transpired that, collectively, it had been 20 years since any of the board members had actually gone out and bought his own car. Similarly, it should be an article of faith that the management and all employees of a mobile operator should buy and pay for their own mobile phone, said Will Harris, ceo of The Bank. In fact, when Harris had been at O2 the company had made that an item of faith amongst its staff.
Similarly, another O2 initiative may solve the worries of actual customers facing the industry audience. Customers needed on the spot sales experience to help them overcome the problems of phone customisation and configuration, something O2’s Walk Out Working campaign has been designed to address.
Real customers, who were bravely put in front of an industry audience by the conference organisers, were encouraged to talk about their actual experiences. With all four users, despite their highly varying level of technical aptitude, customer service and support was paramount amongst their frustrations.
One high end user complained of fruitless technical support calls, while one other user who barely used her phone lamented that she was unaware she was eligible for the free upgrade to a phone which may have stimulated greater usage.
