Mobile phone networks are, in essence, in the communications business. Yet how ironic then that, when it comes to communicating with our own customers, we as an industry often come up short.
There are multiple reasons why that happens, but the major ones are the difficulty in managing complexity and the cost of doing so.
Classic landline phone systems were static; they allowed subscribers to communicate via voice, and that’s all. Today’s modern mobile telecommunication companies, on the other hand, have constantly evolving feature sets and improved hardware, which must work using many legacy systems that were not designed for a constantly-evolving connected ecosystem, and still be able to receive a consistent signal from myriad cell towers.
While we can solve these problems over time, we also must keep a customer service organization aware of the latest challenges and be able to communicate with what may be frustrated customers. The challenge is how to do so cost-effectively. As consumers, we’ve all experienced crazy-long wait times to get phone help, visited a retail store for quick-fix or sat for long minutes in front of a screen as an internet chat agent juggled multiple complaints. At Visible, that was not an option.
When we conceived of Visible as an online-only, purely digital mobile phone provider, we knew that great customer service would be key. Operating without any physical locations meant that subscribers would have to get answers either through an online chat, or from a community forum, not from a brick-and-mortar store. The challenge for us was that as a low-cost carrier, we had to make sure that while we were offering great customer service we were also minimizing our costs to do so.
To get our cost-to-serve, or CTS, dramatically lower, we developed a multi-pronged approach. So as not to keep you in suspense, we were successful beyond our wildest dreams: thanks to our strategy we were able to lower our CTS by an amazing 70+ percent(chart below).