‘A Stellar Experience at All Touch Points is Needed’
Head – Customer Services, Aircel
Alok Kumar, an engineer from IIT Kharagpur, has been instrumental in laying the foundations of Service Delivery organization for leading telecom operators in India – both in the mobile / fixed line & data services. He has behind him 37 years of career spanning sales, ISO 9000 / total quality management including 28 years in Customer Service Delivery, Quality & Enterprise CRM implementation in leading organizations like Xerox, Escotel, Bharti Airtel and now Aircel. In an email interview with Voice&Data, Kumar elaborates about the company’s achievements and plans. Some excerpts:
Voice&Data:
How are customer services playing a role in enhancing customer experience and preventing subscriber churn in the competitive telecom landscape?
Alok Kumar:
Customer Service is broadening its role and enlarging its play within the organization to cater more efficiently to its customers. It has evolved from being a reactive contributor in terms of efficiently handling customer issues, requests & queries, to a more proactive role and is now leading Customer Experience enhancement for strengthening its brand proposition.
This is being done through a series of initiatives/programs/management practices:
‘Customer listening’ programs that involve inter functional leadership teams in constantly engaging with different segments of consumers to understand changing expectations, delivery gaps & opportunities for differentiation.
Using big data analytics on customer data during usage, interaction history, etc., which leads to identifying specific customer requirements and addressing any underlying concerns they are facing in a proactive manner.
Keeping a regular pulse on existing customers to assess their brand experience and all customer impacting processes as well measuring impact of brand positioning from customers perspective vis-a-vis competition.
Benchmarking & imbibing best practices in Customer Experience methods & techniques from across industry segments.