CEM

CEM TOOLS
The tools are available,
it’s the team work
that’s needed
Looking after the customer experience is a team game,
which involves many different players with a
multiplicity of skills. If you can harmonise them, you
create a powerful force that exceeds the sum of its
parts. If you don’t they will work against you, writes
Nick Booth
Mohammed Sha:
CSPs still struggling
with offering a
seamless omnichannel
experience
As communications service providers (CSPs)
look to create an omni-channel for CEM,
they need to introduce new processes,
systems and skills into their businesses. “All
CSPs want an omni-channel, but many are
cursed with an ominous channel,” says Guru Grewal,
head of Virtusa’s telecoms solutions department.
Grewal’s job is to help CSPs to harmonise their
people, processes and systems so that everyone
knows their position and their team customer
experience management (CEM) formation keeps its
shape. In CSP terms, that means that the people in the
call centre have an almost telepathic understanding
with the staff in the shops, the engineers in the field
and the machines that automate responses.
For this reason, the management of all these players is
a top down job. The former player-coaches – such as
the chief technical officer or the marketing boss – are
too involved in their own game to take a managerial
overview. For this reason, the job of CEM is now run
by someone upstairs – in a more directorial role.
“It is essential that the CTO and the CMO align their
strategies to ensure that the customer is the overall
champion,” says Niamh Dundon, senior marketing
manager at Openet. That alignment must come from
on high, Dundon argues.
That means someone has to bash these heads
together, says David Heaps, the senior vice president
of corporate strategy at CSG International. “CEM
needs to be driven from the very top of the
organisation,” says Heaps, “because the network is
only one factor.”
The job has become complex
because there are so many
elements involved, so CEM is no longer
a project or a business division but a complete
change of culture, according to René Tonon,
Sysmech’s business development manager. “Hanny
Moneim [the head of customer care at Vodafone
Egypt] recently explained at a CEM conference that it
took over three years for the whole business culture to
change at Vodafone Egypt.”
Since the cultural elements – the people and
processes – are possibly too complex to outline here,
it might be worth examining the importance of
harmonising systems.
▲
44
VANILLAPLUS MAGAZINE I AUGUST / SEPTEMBER 2015