Service and trailblazing by phone
The Big Three telecoms all say they win at customer service. Do they?
For 21 years, Sophie Smith has had a cellphone plan with Rogers Communications Inc., the largest carrier in Canada. The relationship wasn’t always perfect, but it was good enough to keep her from taking her business elsewhere. Until now, that is.
Smith, 38, who lives near Ottawa, is engaged in a billing dispute over services she didn’t want, but was told were part of a promotion she could cancel, and would never be charged for. She was charged. After two calls to the customer service hotline and one angry Twitter rant, she’s shopping for a new provider. Her first stop? A Telus Corp. store, where she believes she’ll be treated better.
“I don’t have time to deal with this stuff,” a resigned Smith said by phone.
Stories like Smith’s are splashed across the Internet — in forums and on fan pages that look like hate pages, a public tug of war between Canadians and the telecom companies that serve them. Rogers isn’t the only target. In an online forum, a user asked: “Hey, Telus! Why do you suck so much?” (In the same thread, another user called Telus Corp. “a gift from God.”) And to BCE Inc.’s Bell Mobility: “Get your sh — together,” from a Reddit user.
Based on what telecom executives are saying publicly, customer service is something they’re taking very, very seriously. BCE’s George Cope told shareholders that a focus on service is “paramount.” During the past two years, the telecom has spent $300 million to upgrade its IT systems so it can collect deeper insights about its subscribers and what they want.
Guy Laurence, chief executive at Rogers, has not stopped talking about how much he cares for his clients since he arrived in 2013. Improved service is a pillar by which both companies measure success.
In its “expect more” ad campaign, Telus is telling people that it’s the best for service today and it’ll do even better than the best tomorrow. In fact, internally, it strives to be the world’s most recommended company.
“One of the easiest things is to understand, at a visceral level, what customers don’t like and stop doing it,” Darren Entwistle, chief executive at Telus, said last month during an interview.
The trio of companies say they have made strides to improve customer service, citing internal and external statistics and reports. But just how wide those strides are is a matter of debate among Canadians, who have long and loudly expressed discontent about their telecom service. In big cities and to the untrained eye, differences between networks and devices are difficult to spot and the Big Three don’t compete much when it comes to price, at least not in the long term. So the only way for these companies to grow is to serve the customer better than anyone else — or, at least, create the perception that they do.
THE TROUBLE WITH NUMBERS
When it comes to call centre volumes, all of the big telecom companies report fewer calls. Rogers says volume — voice, online chat and email — has declined 12.4 per cent compared with last year. Over the past four years, Bell says it’s shaved a third, or about 18 million calls. Telus says it’s slashed call volume by 45 per cent since 2011 and spends less time handling the calls that are received. They have all piled capital into building better apps and websites that allow consumers to serve themselves or find answers to their questions online instead of phoning in.
There have also been fewer complaints to the Commissioner for Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS), a non-profit that is mandated by the country’s telecom watchdog to handle specific grievances related to contract compliance, billing errors, service delivery and credit management.
In its latest annual report, the number of complaints to the CCTS dropped 17 per cent compared with the previous year, to 11,340, the first decrease in the agency’s history. Rogers, Bell and Telus say this proves they’ve got better at preventing and resolving complaints. But what that number doesn’t take into account are the more common customer complaints: time spent on hold; whether an agent was rude, inept or uninformed; if there were language barriers; rate of transfer; etc. — aren’t within the mandate of the CCTS, which deals primarily with financial matters.
“It’s risky to say complaints are down, so customers are satisfied and happier. I’m not sure there’s evidence to justify that blunt statement,” Howard Maker, commissioner of the CCTS, said in an interview.
Another metric some telecoms use, particularly internally, is how likely its existing subscribers are to recommend the company and its services to family and friends.
In a survey for Telus conducted by market research company Ipsos, the company says that it had a recommendation score of 73 per cent during the past quarter, which the carrier claims is 20 to 25 per cent higher than what rivals Bell and Rogers scored.
Bell contracted Nielsen to compute a similar survey, which sampled 5,060 respondents online in September for television services in Canada. According to results for the third quarter provided by Bell, its Fibe TV scored an recommendation rate of 42 per cent and all its TV services had a score of 31 per cent. Conversely, in this category Telus had a score of 33 per cent and Rogers 18 per cent.
It’s impossible to compare these kinds of surveys, because the methodologies differ wildly and the studies are tailored to the individual preferences of each client, says Ray Kong, who leads a unit that does work for telecom sector at Ipsos Loyalty Canada. He says there is no reliable index in Canada that measures the state of service in telecom. He declined to comment on the survey results that Telus made public.
“There are no standards, I’m afraid to say,” Kong said during a phone interview. “There is no independent and objective metric that will say this is the state of customer service in telecom. There isn’t much evidence to support one way or the other. These statements by the executives, they’re PR exercises.”
As an industry, telecom has scored worse in customer satisfaction than other industries such as insurance, banking and cars, according to Adrian Chung, account director at market research firm J.D. Power and Associates, based on the research his organization does.
Has the service improved? “Slight improvements, but not significant,” Chung said.
According to a J.D. Power survey conducted last October and again in March, of 5,151 Canadians, SaskTel ranked the best in customer care with a perfect score of five stars. Telus’s flagship brand earned four stars whereas Rogers and Bell were awarded two stars out of five, the worst among the eight carriers.
Chung said it takes time to move the needle when it comes to public perception of customer service. “This kind of stuff doesn’t happen overnight for companies of this size, stature and baggage, to be honest.”
SERVICE CHAMPIONS
Despite the sizable challenge they face, the two men in charge of creating a better customer experience at BCE and Rogers are upbeat.
In a given year, Bell will interact with its customers more than 100 million times. “It’s easy to say you want to improve service, but once you get under the hood, the complexity of managing 100 million
interactions across many systems, it becomes a challenge,” said John Watson, executive vice-president of customer operations at BCE, who was at Telus before joining Bell five years ago. “There’s always going to be spots where it’s not flawless. We’re quietly, constructively delivering on an improved service agenda.”
For example, in 2014, Bell introduced a two-hour appointment window for installations and says its technicians arrive within the window 98 per cent of the time. Since 2012, the average installation time has declined by 27 per cent, as more resources were poured into technical training.
Watson attributes half of the company’s growth in profits to customer experience. But progress takes time. It took Bell 18 months to update its billing system, offering a more detailed and interactive version online.
His counterpart at Rogers is Deepak Khandelwal, a cheery engineer who spent 16 years at McKinsey & Co. before he joined Google Inc. in 2010. With his hiring in 2014, Khandelwal became Rogers’s first-ever chief customer officer,
which manages almost 10,000 front-line employees across every business unit. Laurence recruited Khandelwal as a part of his multiyear overhaul, dubbed Rogers 3.0.
During his first nine months in the post, Khandelwal says he’s tried to put a more rigorous process in place around collecting and analyzing data that show what is bothering subscribers most and how bothered they are by it. He has a laundry list of things to fix. He says a pair of his initial results is the new Rogers bill and the launch of a popular new cellular roaming plan called “Roam Like Home.”
“There’s no magic silver bullet,” Khandelwal said. “You have to keep doing this, one customer at a time, fix any irritants that are out there and then, you kind of see this overall experience get better.”
THE TRAILBLAZER
The path Rogers is taking — changing the things that bother customers most — sounds a lot like the one Telus began travelling seven years ago.
In 2008, a fuming Darren Entwistle abruptly left a forum of senior Telus leaders so he could yell in private. “I had to walk out of the room to scream,” he said, “‘cause I was so pissed.”
The company had been enforcing a policy that required workers at its call centres to answer 80 per cent of inbound inquiries in 20 seconds. With reps racing to address the next call, customer complaints weren’t being resolved and 35 per cent were phoning back about the same issue.
Instead of measuring speed, Entwistle rewrote the rules to focus on how reps can offer the best outcome for the client. Many leaders resisted, citing concerns that call volume would grow. It took Telus 18 months to implement it. “Old paradigms, certainly, I underestimated how hard it is to shake them off,” he added. “Maybe I should have had Taylor Swift there.”
Since then, Telus has made an effort to stop doing the things customers hate. The company removed as many as 30 practices deemed to be irritants, even though Entwistle estimates 75 per cent of them yielded a hit to EBITDA in the short run. Years later, it looks like those seeds are bearing fruit.
The lifetime value of a cellphone user at Telus has jumped 47 per cent to $5,426 in 2014 from $3,700 in 2010, according to internal statistics. In 2014, the average wireless customer has been loyal to Telus for 85 months versus 63 months in the prior period. Over the last year, Telus added fewer monthly cellphone customers on a gross basis than its two national rivals, but netted more overall because it retains a bigger percentage of its base.
John Izzo, a consultant in Vancouver who worked for Telus during its transformative years, credits its top brass for sticking to a strategy when it is so easy to sway.
At a high level, the playbooks these companies are following are similar. “They’re all structuring the same plays,” Izzo said. “But (Rogers and Bell) aren’t executing. It’s subtle stuff.”
For the roughly $300 million Telus spends yearly to realize its customer-first strategy, it generates $450 million in cost benefits, according to internal data.
But is the progress that the Big Three have made enough, or are consumers just so used to bad service, they no longer know what good service looks like?
This kind of stuff doesn’t happen overnight for companies of this size, stature and baggage, to be honest.