Una interessante analisi del lavoro svolto negli ultimi anni da Sky Italia che passa attraverso l’ascolto della voce del cliente ed il customer engagement.

I’ve been without Verizon On-demand, TV menu, and other cable services for almost 2 weeks now.  Multiple chat sessions, phone calls and emails have only resulted in my spending nearly 4 hours unplugging and re-plugging my cable and router connections and re-booting the cable box while a customer service agent goes through a canned checklist of things to investigate.  Verizon assessed the issue as either a bad cable (although the second floor TV works fine if a bit slower than usual) or a bad box. Did I mention that this repair call was scheduled 10 days in advance and that according to my contract, Verizon does not have to adjust my bill (provide me with credit) for these lack of services for which I have already paid?

I requested they send me a new HD cable box and the agent said unless I remove the cable box from the second floor and plug it into the main floor to see if it worked, they would not send me new one. However, if while moving the second floor box, it becomes damaged or is configured differently than the one on the main floor when I connect it, I would be responsible for the repairs and/or equipment. Oh, and if the issue is a bad cable, I am responsible for the house-call and new cable installation since it is out of warranty.

Moreover, every time there is a storm, or rain, or snow, I lose dial tone and the ability to make phone calls on my LAN line. Verizon does not know if this is connected the the TV issue or not and suggested that my Panasonic phone might be at fault–even though it is located inside the house and works fine in good weather. On a positive note, the agent I spoke with  (on a day when my phone was working) was VERY polite, but was not authorized to provide me with what I requested/needed. He was also not able to schedule service within 48 hours–which would have been a very welcome level of service.

So, here I sit waiting for the repair person to make his/her house-call between 1PP-5PM. In contrast to Verizon and Comcast, (I had Comcast many year ago and dumped them for Verizon.) see how Sky Italia works hard to ensure their customers’ continued loyalty. (I’m now evaluating other options for service in the USA so suggestions are welcome! Send them to: Research@HypatiaResearch.com.)

Update: Verizon sent a text message today stating the repair person would arrive between 2:30-3:30PM. The repair person called at 4:45PM and said he would arrive in 30 minutes. Guess someone did their holiday shopping instead of showing up on time?

Sky Italia: Transforming Customer Engagement with Enterprise Voice of the Customer Solutions

Founded in July of 2003 by Rupert Murdoch, Sky Italia, is acknowledged as revolutionizing media entertainment in Italian television by combining the best deal of programs and events, national and international, with innovative technologies. In fact, Sky was the first Italian television to broadcast in High Definition, to provide its subscribers with a Personal Video Recorder, MySkyHD, Sky OnDemand (an advanced on demand service), and Sky Go and to provide a wide selection of channels and on-demand content on the move, via tablets, PCs, Mac, and smartphones.

An estimated 4.73 million Italian families have chosen to subscribe to Sky which translates into a television audience of approximately 15 million viewers. This media company offers more than 170 channels and pay per view – including 62 in High Definition and one in 3D – and more than 80 audio channels and digital radio-thematic. Has given rise to new format, involving big-name entertainers and talent, and has gradually increased its commitment in the original production and investment in technological innovation.

On the Road to Customer Centricity

Not content to rest on its past success, the company’s CEO Andrea Zappia decided to launch a new department and appointed Susan Wakefield to head it as director of customer experience. For nearly two years, she and a cross functional team studied various performance metrics, how to best align and measure these key performance indicators in regards to quantifying customer relationships, lifetime value, preferences, potential new products or services etc…

From an organizational perspective, Sky Italia differs from many companies outside of EMEA. In fact, this fairly new customer experience team resides within the operations group and is considered part of the media company’s change management initiative in transforming Sky Italia into a customer centric organization by influencing all departments that touch the customer at various points of engagement.

For example, the customer experience (CX) team is separate from the marketing & insights functions which report into Marketing. Conversely, the CX function reports directly into Operations, and the group is divided into two teams—CX analysis & CX projects. Comprised of four fulltime analysts and support personnel, the CX Analysis team is responsible, amongst other things, for the analysis of customer verbatim and the providing of actionable insights to the business. Another of their roles is to supervise the handling of the close-the-loop calls proactively made to all heavy detractors and the insertion of any additional feedback into the analysis loop.

Bottom line: business owners are responsible actioning and executing the recommended business process improvements.

Operationalizing Voice of the Customer Insights

Having determined which touch-points within the customer’s journey would be most informative for measuring customer engagement, potential for greater share of wallet, commitment or dissatisfaction with its brand or services, Sky Italia focused on these six areas—which extended across functions and departments.

• Sales to consumers: The journey from initial contact to conversion.
• Installation scheduling and completion for consumers: The process from start to finish.
• After receipt of first bill: Were services as described and billing correct and easy to understand.
• Two months after installation: Survey of six questions is sent to ascertain if service and options are clear and easily understood and if information is easy to find online.
• Inbound calls to call center and back office performance: Were interaction and issue resolution professional, timely and accurate?
• Random sampling of customers to elicit input at various customer touch-points and journeys to discover any insights or issues to resolve.

Sky Italia is able to receive multi-source and multi-channel input from clients, analyze and categorize the information by issue and sentiment (positive, negative or neutral), and take deep dive analysis to uncover root cause or correlations among entities, issues or circumstances. Comments received are fed into the existing enterprise Customer Relationship Management (Siebel CRM), in parallel so that agents are able to rapidly respond to issues. In addition, analysts have visibility to review and analyze comments prior to sending alerts to appropriate team members.

Becoming customer centric at Sky Italia meant that strong governance processes were required to be put in place as well as involving the Human Capital Management (HCM/HR) department or the personnel officer to insert NPS as an additional key performance indicator (KPI) in employee incentive programs. Culture changes necessitated educating the entire organization. For example, does the legal department even think about consumers when creating legal documents? Are they easy for consumers to understand? Is the language clear without multiple pages of “fine print”? Being customer centric at Sky Italia is not just the call center’s responsibility. Everyone from sales, installation to billing and marketing needed put the customer at the center of their work-day–customer service & support especially.

Lessons Learned & Results

One of Sky Italia’s major findings was that their education and information sharing processes with customers required improvement. Support for walking clients through a technology upgrade process earned them less than satisfactory feedback. For example, a significant number of customers believed that Sky Italia merely provided installation, upgrades and billing and then walking away once they signed up. The company quickly realized that while the existing customer engagement processes make perfect sense from an internal perspective—customer perception was altogether different. It became readily apparent that customers receiving upgrade or updated instructional information for the first time were confused and not fully satisfied with the level and type of communication they received.

To its credit, Sky Italia moved quickly to correct this perception by improving their communication and education materials making them more customer friendly in tone and style. Simple things such as instead of “We provide XYZ during the trial period” a more customer centric tone such as “Welcome to our trial period during which you may sample XYZ at your leisure” was used. Additionally, the CX projects team kept track of language and ensured that all definitions and words are used consistently across all touch-points.

Moreover, Hypatia recommends that companies should learn how to do journey mapping according to each enterprise’s customer priorities and key customer engagement processes, and align them with metrics that will lead to actionable insights rather than more reports or dashboards. For Sky Italia, this meant creating journey mapping and measuring the customer life-cycle according to five key journeys.

1) Decision—sales through conversions

2) On-boarding—welcoming and educational processes

3) Resolution—of technology or administrative problem via all channels

4) Evolution—upgrading technology or service packages

5) Re-evaluation—downgrading or customer churn

Developing measurable metrics or scores along with closed loop processes around these five journeys was critical in empowering Sky Italia to enhance their customer engagement processes through a fluid horizontal flow that puts the customer at the center of each and every process, interaction, communication or touch-point. Moreover, HCM involvement facilitated changes in employee payment plans so that customer-facing KPI’s would be part of every employee performance review, bonus, and commission or incentive program. Customer-centricity and employee compensation packages would be intertwined.

In short, the company redesigned the business so that vertical business processes (i.e. in silos where sales only cares about conversions and commissions, installation doesn’t care about education or about the hand-off to billing, and call center agents don’t care about what comes after a successful resolution of an issue handled) were effectively transformed to enterprise level, horizontal customer-centric business processes.

Early results of Sky Italia’s enterprise VOC initiatives include:

•  Substantial reduction in calls relating to confusion about first bill received.
•  Significantly higher rates of upselling, capturing greater share of wallet from customers who understood the service and product options more clearly.
• Additional revenue from install base customer recommendations.
• Lower churn rates from customers that subscribe to premium channels

Excerpted from ©2014 Hypatia Research Group, LLC. All Rights Reserved. | “Operationalizing Voice of the Customer: 2014 Benchmarks & Vendor Galaxy Rankings” 

Update: Sky has created Europe’s leading entertainment company after completing the acquisition of Sky Italia and a majority interest in Sky Deutschland.