Telecommunications - Retain customers with an excellent customer experience

Customer Relationship Management and Customer Experience Management in the Telecommunications Industry

concertare has been working for telecommunications companies such as mobile network providers, their sales partners, cable network operators, and other telecommunications service providers since 1998.

This market is characterized by a manageable number of providers operating with many thousands of sales partners in an increasingly saturated market. It is necessary to enforce one's own standards and products even with independent sales partners and to develop the sales organization as efficiently as possible, to win new customers and to retain existing customers as efficiently as possible.

concertare provides tools developed specifically for this purpose.

Project topics and services for telecommunications providers

The following tasks are frequently pursued in projects in the telecommunications sector:

Mystery shopping and store checks: Mystery shopping and store checks in the company's own branch network or at independent sales partners are used in particular to collect information aimed at checking compliance with standards, such as specifications for product presentation, availability of goods, promotional campaigns and more.
Test consultations and test purchases: Mystery shoppers test the service quality and customer orientation of sales staff and consultants.
Test calls (mystery calls): For service hotline as well as mystery mails / test mails in support for customers.
Determination of training needs: For customer consultants and sales staff to develop training measures, for an increase in customer satisfaction through better consulting quality in customer contact and higher service orientation.
Verification of training success: Through mystery shopping programs for training success control.
Increasing sales: By checking cross-selling and upselling potentials as well as their exploitation through appropriately focused employee development.
Promotion checks and campaign checks: To determine the success of promotions, also with sales partners.
Dealer surveys
Customer surveys
Employee surveys
Observation of the competition and determination of benchmark data

Clients (Extract)

Methods for optimizing customer relationship management for mobile operators and telecommunications service providers

As part of our mystery research activities as well as surveys for mobile phone providers and network operators, we use various survey methods to generate data on all aspects of quality in customer contact.

The most important instruments used by concertare include:

Mystery research surveys: In particular mystery shopping, store checks, test purchases, and test consultations as well as the quality analysis of recorded sales conversations.
Key figure analyses: Such as sales per store, per customer and per employee, complaint rate, customer satisfaction index, customer loyalty and churn rate, repurchase probability, and Net Promoter Score.
Customer surveys: On topics such as price perception, quality in customer contact, experienced customer orientation, service quality, or perception of promotional campaigns
Employee surveys & Partner surveys: Surveys of sales and retail partners in the telecommunications sector, for example.
Process analyses along the customer journey: Determination of brand perception, information and comparison behavior, or optimization of complaint management and telephone customer support for private and business customers.

Mystery research instruments for telecommunication providers

We use mystery research instruments to measure all relevant customer contact channels, primarily by means of test purchases, test visits, observations, test calls / mystery calls, test e-mails, test chats, or audits.

These mystery research methods used offer the advantage of not only measuring customer contact quality, but also improving it in individual training sessions as part of ongoing employee development, thus providing sales staff or customer support with targeted training in service orientation and consulting quality.

Our test customers (mystery shoppers), who are specially trained for the telecommunications sector and specific product groups, use a scenario agreed with you in advance to test the key factors for customer contact quality and thus provide objective feedback from the customer's point of view on the conversation situation experienced.

In the telecommunications sector in particular, mystery shopping can be used to test criteria that are difficult or impossible to measure in pure customer surveys. These include, for example, all internal standards that cannot be known to normal customers. Our trained test customers are carefully trained on your internal standards, enabling them to assess compliance with these standards by means of store checks or test calls to the hotline.

Other methods are aimed at checking the holistic customer experience along the customer journey: this can include upstream steps such as information and online search behavior about prices and products before visiting the cell phone store or store, as well as direct customer contact at the point of sale. Store characteristics are also analyzed (findability, on-site parking situation, product presentation, cleanliness, and order, etc.), right through to employee-related criteria (welcome by sales staff, needs analysis of customer wishes, quality of advice, behavior, etc.).

Customer Surveys in the telecommunications sector

concertare not only offers test purchases and mystery research procedures, but has also been successfully using customer surveys for years.

With industry expertise and experience in designing standardized surveys, we collect customer satisfaction, willingness to change, and many other key figures. These can be compared across customers from different stores, different regions, or even customer types.

Customer forums, customer panels, and focus group discussions are among the qualitative market research methods we use, especially when measuring customer wishes or changes in customer expectations. These qualitative methods and our recommendations for action derived from them help you to be future-oriented in the telecommunications market.

High customer loyalty through excellent service orientation

In mystery shopping projects for mobile phone providers, the objective varies from case to case. However, three orientations can be distinguished, which are relatively often in focus, both individually and in combination with each other:

Sales-initiated projects for the development of sales staff: Here, the focus is on measuring customer orientation, increasing the quality of advice, an increase in customer satisfaction as well as customer retention, new customer acquisition, and customer win-back.

Projects in the area of training and coaching as well as training success monitoring, which are usually commissioned by the Training or HR / Personnel Development departments: The objective of these projects is to review and adapt training concepts, sales training content, and coaching measures so that sustainable training success is ensured.

Competition monitoring: Trained mystery shoppers use mystery pricing methods to determine the price discounts granted by competitors. Competitor research also includes the monitoring of promotion campaigns and store checks of mobile competitors. Competitor checks are usually initiated by the business intelligence department or sales management and can provide important information, for example, on winning back customers.

Benchmark data for telecommunications providers

Benchmark studies are frequently used to compare the company's own mobile communications stores and retail partners with each other or with competitors.

The comparison can cover various aspects, such as the comparison of key performance indicators for customer satisfaction or complaint rates, a comparison of the performance of the sales force (sales per employee), the average success of promotional campaigns, and the like. Since such benchmark studies usually involve a large number of surveys, they are correspondingly costly.

Since 2005, concertare has been regularly collecting corresponding benchmark tests in all relevant areas of the German telecommunications market. We make this benchmark data available to all providers who wish to compare themselves with their direct competitors and other market participants.

Customer experience management in telecommunications - further information

Trends, current studies, and practical examples on the topics of mystery shopping, store checks, and customer relationship management in the telecommunications market can be found in the Infocenter and on the concertare blog.