LIVE FROM COMMUNICASIA 2013: Operators should ensure that they use customer service metrics which are focused on providing the best results to customers, rather than focusing on outcomes for the organisation itself, Anthony Thomas, CIO of Vodafone India said.

“Change the culture and the measure and the metrics,” he advised.

Speaking in the opening Empowering the Customer session at CommunicAsia 2013 this morning, the executive noted that, for example,  the focus on “closing” support calls within a specific time may miss the fact that the consumer was not properly satisfied with the result.

Citing the example of a customer who said that Vodafone support calls always end with the advice to change the SIM, he noted that this was often the fall back for agents unable to resolve issues within the allocated two minute time frame.

“At the end of the day, the customer experience is not just about how we interact with the customer, it’s  about how we empower our colleagues, how  we change our metrics so that people don’t close that as a successful call without providing the right outcome for the customer,” Thomas said.

The executive noted that while operators have large amounts of data which can be used to proactively serve customers, he noted that in many cases this is not acted on.

“A data centre manager said to me, ‘we have the largest amount of data in the world’. I looked at him and said ‘so what’?”

“The first challenge is getting the right data, in the right form”, he said.