AT&T Harnesses Data to Improve Customer Experience

(Oct 24 2011) 4G , Yankee Group

1. Lots of operators pay lip service to improving their customers’ overall experience, but few have the data, metrics and database firepower to prove they actually do. 

   Enter AT&T. At 4G World 2011’s Customer Experience Summit, James Egan, customer service director for AT&T Mobility, explained how his company uses Six Sigma process-based initiatives along with systems from Amdocs to incrementally track, measure, improve, re-measure and re-improve several small aspects of customer service—across multiple channels—that together result in large measurable gains for the carrier.

   Egan said AT&T initially chose to improve its self-service channel because that is an area the carrier felt could provide two key benefits: improved customer service and cost savings.

   For example, Egan said AT&T looked at the online self-service channel and the process customers use to view and make adjustments to their bill. Like all online service channels, AT&T requires customers use a password to interact on its site. Unfortunately, many customers find it difficult to remember their password each time and are forced to recover or reset them. AT&T found a significant number of customers were attempting but failing to recover their passwords, forcing them to call the carrier for help and wait for an SMS text with their new password. 

   “Once we had the data to go on, we simply redesigned the password recovery process so customers can get their password and stay in the online experience. It sounds like a simple thing, but simple processes add up,” Egan said. “We took a significant top-level load off the call center and offloaded it to online. And that lets us provide high standards of service at a reasonable level of cost.”

   AT&T saw similar gains with recent product launches and its online help tools. “We have a program with Amdocs where we look at the online customer chatter around new device launches,” Egan explained. “We can quickly interpret that chatter to look at the content and whether we provide the right tools and help in our Web documentation. If not, within 72 hours, we can clinically go in and rewrite the online documentation to help answer questions that are cropping up. It can be something as simple as changing the wording so that the next time customers have the same question or issue, they can search on Google and be instantly presented with a series of solutions, and one of those will be the exact article they need on ATT.com.”

   “That’s what’s impressive,” said Susan McNeice, research VP at Yankee Group and co-moderator of the Customer Experience Summit. “You’ve harnessed data inside – but also outside the business. And that’s where the big gains are.”

   For more on 4G World 2011, visit the show Web site. 

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