Stuart McDonald (SM): Having served in a transformation role at Cathay I was attracted to the prospect of being in a position at CSL to really help set the direction of the business. Being a commercially-focused individual I've always found it interesting to be in a role where I could have an influence on where the company is going.
The vision at CSL is to take a step away from the traditional position of the telecoms market where the proposition is usually around a new device and the network service we offer and at a certain price. But instead really focus on the customer relationship. We have a real desire to understand who they are and how to make their experiences as good as possible. There is a clear top-down commitment to this rather than a consultant just dropping in and saying we need to do things this way.
SM: I think the importance varies depending on sectors, but one thing do I notice at CIO events that I attend, the talks often showcase or start with the technology from the bottom up, and the customer experience is almost the last area for attention.
I think the technology industry as a whole and telecoms to some extent is still blinkered in terms of where the customer priority should be. People in IT need to answer the question: Do they want a key role in determining the overall direction and strategy of the company?
At the end of the day it's the customers that keep us in the business not whether we have the greatest back-end services and capabilities or we provide the best devices. It's all about how the customers can make use of these things in their life--without that it matters little to customers.
SM: So this has been going on for some time. In reality IT started this on the systems side of things and my job is to try and bring that back to the customer experience, bring this back around the core business objectives and the processes around the customer.
We need to evaluate what this transformation means to all parts of the business? What impact will it bring to our marketers, our sales people and call centers? What do these guys need to do differently to embrace this change to be more customer-centric? How do service agents serve different customer segments? How do they deliver different service levels? And from a technology perspective, how we do we build platforms to support these different things be it CRM solutions or others.
It's not driven by changing things for the sake of technology, but always having in mind that we are improving or adding to the customer experience.
SM: A lot of what we want to do is around giving customers more choice -- so breaking away from traditional service plan structures and allowing them to use plans that meet their needs and, in a broader sense, the needs of friends and family members. It is about more socially-oriented product sets instead of the traditional one-to-one services that exist today.
SM: I believe we have a reasonable view of our customers, we can easily see what services each customer has with us and the interaction on those services. But I think the idea of a 'single customer view' is a very corporate-centric view and in my mind that's not very customer-centric.
It should be about how can I, as a customer, leverage my own connections and networks and access different products and services based on who I know and what I do. Instead today most operators have this hierarchical view that details what the company thinks is important to you --things like your job, your income and basic demographics.
SM: I think with loyalty today, there is an element that comes through who are your friends and how your own personal networks are defined. If there is a critical mass of people on a particular social media then that determines a sense of loyalty.
From the perspective of being a mobile operator, you still need a high quality network and all the fundamentals of a good service to be at the table. But these are the basic table stakes and that alone isn't enough. So on top of the infrastructure, the challenge is to provide services that are really relevant to customers and their social needs and not be focused on simply creating this notion of "stickiness".
SM: Social media has two sides, one is how do we use it to serve our customers better and second how can we use it as a company to better communicate and collaborate. Plus there is also how we use it to gauge customer or market sentiment. I see merit in all these cases and there are good examples of using social media to deliver better service--one being service and customer updates via Facebook.
Sentiment monitoring is interesting. We are already monitoring the trends, but how do more effectively turn this information into a business decision or action. One of the things that I challenge my team is if we cannot clearly identify a business decision that will change or benefit from the information or support that we provide -- then why provide that information?
SM: You look around today and staff in all companies are already bringing their own devices whether IT knows it or not. So it's already happening and CIOs need to deal with this. In fact the CIO who said 'no' is more likely to create a security issue by not embracing and properly managing this change.
We do have our own mobile device management services for corporate customers today and CSL is also moving ahead in its own effort to fully embrace this change.
We haven't gone fully BYOD yet but it's definitely high on my priority list and in many ways I'm probably one of the prime examples of consumerization today. I'm the one that is always pushing the team to consider new things, as I love technology and I'm always trying out the new and latest toys and asking how they might co-exist in the corporate environment.
SM: Yes most definitely in the geek category, which is bad for my children. Since they are not teenagers yet, I have technology that allows me follow them and know what they're doing at all times!
On the device front, I'm currently on iPhone and iPad but I tend to use all devices. For two reasons, to see and explore how they work for me personally, but also to see how well they work in the corporate level. I'll try anything new, I'm always on the lookout for new possibilities.