Top Spend Customers

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 26-Apr-2005 01:04 PM
[Posted for Sarwi Rahaman]

I work for a Telecomms company in Nigeria—one of the biggest in Africa at the moment. And we are trying to develop/break into CRM conditioning.

I work in a Contact Centre and would like to know how to manage/handle our highest spend subscribers?

These are people who are at the highest levels of society in my country, ex-presidents, CEOs of companies, etc.

These are subscribers that we have to handle with sensitivity, as they are not like your average Joe on the street. And they have the money to prove it.

My question is two-fold:

1. How do we handle/manage our highest spend subscribers?
2. How do we grow their spend? Or increase their ARPU?

Sarwi 'Rahaman
Customer Care Group

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 26-Apr-2005 01:14 PM
[Posted for David Rance]

Your question brought back many happy memories. I was customer care director in a mobile network (BTCellnet), and while I was there I established the High Value Customer segment team, bringing together all the services (billing, admin, network, directory etc) for our premium and high value customers.

Since leaving BTCellnet to set up Round, I have worked with several mobile operators including:

• T-Mobile Group
• T-Mobile UK
• T-Mobile Germany
• T-Mobile Austria
• T-Mobile Netherlands
• T-Mobile Hungary
• Mobimak
• Orange
• Turkcell
• Virgin Mobile Singapore (part of the launch team)
• Kingston Mobile
• BT Mobility

As you suggest, high-value customers represent the highest revenue, highest potential, highest influence and lowest tolerance level of all your customers. This needs to be a premium service, the best you can deliver, that is executed consistently across the business. You said you work in customer care. What about marketing, sales (channels) and collections? Are they involved in the project? If not, they should be; otherwise, you'll create inconsistencies for the customer.

It starts with a clear definition of what you want from this special segment. Is it minimum churn, customer satisfaction, customer retention, maximum ARPU or maximum profitability? These are often mutually exclusive, so it's important to determine which are the most important. Once you are clear about what you are trying to achieve from this segment, you need to define the customer experience that is required to deliver this, which must be applied consistently across the business. It will lead you into the definition of processes, policies, decision-making authority of the front-line people, governance for rapid change, information, insight gathering, decisioning support, products, pricing strategy and so on.

One of the key decisions is to set up an elite team in customer care and enable these customers to speak with them. This special group only handles these customers. The core of CRM is the 'R'—relationship—so the culture of the care team is critical to your success. Pick the people with care. It is not just those with the highest skill level or experience but also the ones with the best rapport-building skills and decision-making ability.

Include in the team a process analyst, IT analyst and database analyst. Their job is to support the team to provide whatever they need to satisfy the customers be it process change, data mining analytics etc. Make sure the team managers are coach/facilitators—not command and control freaks. The team should be largely self-managing. Each day, the team should ask themselves "What went well?" and "What can we improve?" Give the customers a special number to call or prioritise the call routing tables, so they don't wait and they speak to the right team. Give customers the ability to contact the team members directly, via email or SMS. Make sure the care team all have mobiles and email addresses that they can view on their mobiles. This will encourage out of hours communication, essential for good relationship building.

Get the technology right. Intelligent call-routing and screen-pop are a must. Develop rules-based routing so that customers get to speak to the same team, even the same person, whenever possible. You want all the information available at every touch-point. Make sure that if the customer uses the web, your care team knows and can even complete transactions that the customer started. Set up a separate customer database, if necessary, so you can record and access all the information about each customer, not just the transactions but the insights, customer feedback, latest news about them that can be used in conversation—anything that enables your care team to build a relationship with them.

High-value customers want and expect something different. Throw away the rule book. Get your care team to find out how each customer wants to be treated, how they want you to communicate with them. Define different processes and business rules for each customer. If the customer provides feedback, let them act on it and tell the customer what they've changed. Subdivide the customers into needs groups, and map these to care agents. Win their trust and get 'permission' to market to them in the way they want. Wherever possible, sell on the back of service excellence. If they trust the care team members, get them to suggest offers, tariff changes, handset changes and new services. Enable the care team to set them up on behalf of the customer. That will win their trust.

The management team has to buy into this approach. It is essential that someone owns the segment and takes responsibility for the P&L performance. There is a strong business case for managing high value customers in this way but only if it a holistic approach. You cannot just target them with individual offers and expect loyalty.

You also need a clear understanding of your capabilities across the business, and you will to need to prioritize various developments. There are over 70 key capabilities we at Round have identified that need to be aligned if you are going to walk the talk. At Round, we have tools that can help you understand where each of these capabilities are and what is required to close the gap.

Some key "don'ts"

• Don't measure the care team on call handling time. If you must measure them, create new measures that reflect what they are doing ie based on retaining and developing customers
• Don't limit the number of contacts per month. Challenge the team to have at least eight contacts (calls, email, SMS etc) with each customer every month. They will find ways to do this, like confirming changes or providing new information on handsets or services
• Don't let marketing communicate with these customers. All offers and promotions must go through the care team, so you can ensure they are delivered in a way that is consistent to build rapport and trust
• Don't let Collections speak or write to customers. Again, all communication goes through the care team, and they deal with collections issues until it is clear there is fraud or serious bad debt case

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 26-Apr-2005 03:21 PM
[Posted for Bill Price]

1. How do we handle/manage our highest spend subscribers?
   • Decide whether to tell them that they are highest spend or not (at Amazon, we decided not to tell them but, rather, to "wow" them with even better service levels + more)
   • If yes, then either give them a separate number to call or email address to use; if not, through ANI/CLI or CED (caller-entered digits), place at head of all phone queues + handle email fastest, routing both to "best agents"
   • Grant higher levels of concessions
   • Do not hold agents to standard expected AHT; rather, take as much time as it takes to satisfy them
   • Also spend time to listen even more closely to their interests, feedback, suggestions, frustrations, etc; send these learnings to appropriate internal teams "for action" and, if needed, "for reply"
2. How do we grow their spend? Or increase their ARPU?
   • Through a superior product + service in the first place
   • By doing better than other support providers in your country
   • By providing these superior levels of service
   • By selective cross-selling or concessions that will encourage them to stay + buy more.

Bill Price
President & CEO, Driva Solutions
Creating and sustaining highly effective contact center strategies, locally and globally
A LimeBridge Global Alliance founding partner
http://www.drivasolutions.com http://www.limebridge.com

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 27-Apr-2005 10:16 AM
[Posted for Donna Fluss]

In Nigeria, the class of folks you are talking about expect differentiated service. I suggest giving them a special phone number and staffing the phone lines with top agents who are incented to increase the relationships. While it's not the most efficient way to handle calls, it may be a good idea to assign a relationship manager to each of these accounts. That person should be the first route but by no means the only one.

Donna Fluss, Principal
DMG Consulting LLC

Gwynne Young
Managing Editor, CustomerThink
Member

Posted 27-Apr-2005 10:19 AM
[Posted for Graham Hill]

I would however go further than Bill and Donna with regards to differentiated service. In a country like Nigeria, where the VIPs mentioned have virtually ultimate power and authority and the rules, laws and regulations developed by those in power reinforce their own leadership and control, I would expect that they require almost personal service, rather than just differentiated service.

Each of the VIP customers should be scored for their value (now and in the longer-term) and their business and political influence (a proxy for risk). I would also recommend going through a thorough Needs Assessment to make sure that the telco really understands the VIP customers' needs, wants and expectations against what the telco and its competitors currently offer. You would be suprised how often telcos don't really understand or cater to their VIP customers' needs, in their rush to be the most techologically advanced telco on the block.

The best way to do this today is to use Mauborgne's & Chen's Value Innovation framework to suit the telco's needs. This will help identify what exactly the VIP customers really value, how well the telco delivers against these needs in comparison to its competitors and, thus, what to do to really meet their VIP customers' needs.

I would also add that you obviously need to be careful about handling the VIP customers with religious and cultural sensitivity. With Nigeria's population being made up of a mixture of Muslim & Christian religions (60/40), each with very different cultural sensitivities, it is important to manage them accordingly.

Graham Hill, Independent CRM Consultant

Susan Abbott
Member
Picture of Susan Abbott

Posted 28-Apr-2005 08:18 AM
I have looked at customer segmentation in other third world countries, and have found that the top tier frequently accounts for a disproportionate percentage of profitability—much more so than in countries with established middle class.
So the primary goal has to be retention. This group is going to be highly networked among each other, and a reputation for fantastic service will travel quickly among the group.

All of the points mentioned earlier are good ones, but I would add a couple:

1. Do some qualitative research with this group to find out more about their needs and wants. (This can be tricky—I have found receptions in high-end hotels work well for locations in situations like yours)
2. Provide clear guidelines for service recovery situations. This is probably more critical operationally than anything else you might do. Problems need to be handled by seasoned trouble-shooters. Don't wait for these customers to escalate—if the first person can't solve the issue, send it immediately to the troubleshooter team. Plan to call daily or more often until problems are resolved. This will win you great loyalty, more than any discount or special promotion.

Good luck! You sound like you are on the right track!

Customer Experience Strategist
** Qualitative Research ** Change Management Support
blog: www.arc.typepad.com/customercrossroads

Susan Abbott
Member
Picture of Susan Abbott

Posted 02-May-2005 07:33 AM
I was intrigued by this discussion, and so did a little statistical digging at CIA World Fact Book (a great site for statistical snapshots of other countries). I posted some further comments on this topic as well as some bar graphs to illustrate the stats on my blog.

The 2003 statistics show that about 2% of the population had access to a telephone of any kind. Even with the kind of exponential growth that Nigerian telecom is experiencing, these customers are anything but average.
For that same year, the top decile (top 10%) of Nigerians controlle 40% of total income. This compares with the USA at 30% and Canada at 24%.

Keep us posted on what you decide to do please Sarwi—I'm very interested to hear your reaction to the advice you have received. And thank you again for sharing an interesting challenge on this forum.

Customer Experience Strategist
** Qualitative Research ** Change Management Support
blog: www.arc.typepad.com/customercrossroads