Customer Satisfaction on the up and up

By Wholesale

Since 2017 Optus Wholesale & Satellite's unrelenting focus on Customer Experience has driven year on year increases in customer satisfaction across business to business industries*. To understand how they’ve achieved these brilliant results and how it's paying off for OWS and their customers alike, we spoke to Ritu Sinha, AD Commercial Ops and Experience for Wholesale & Satellite.

Why is Customer Experience so important?

It’s Optus’ vision to become Australia’s most loved everyday brand with lasting customer relationships. Customer Experience is important, because it directly influences a customer’s holistic perception of our business, our products and our people. A customer’s every interaction with us - be it with sales, service or our contact centres, through our onboarding process to assurance, delivery and digital platforms - contributes to their overarching customer experience. Delivering great Customer Experience plays a critical role in the achievement of our corporate vision and specifically, of OWS’s goals, helping to differentiate us from our competitors in the marketplace and ultimately shaping our business success.

What’s the history of Customer Experience in OWS?

In OWS we have a genuine passion for Customer Experience and a customer obsessed culture. Over the years we have leveraged CSI metrics to track our successes and more importantly, in the last four years, we have translated these results into actionable insights, supported by strong leadership and governance.

What are the key drivers of Customer Experience in OWS?

In business to business (B2B) environments, our customers expect us to know them and know their business needs. Every customer interaction counts, and it is vital for us to find opportunities to innovate and improve their experience with us.

In my experience, key drivers of Customer Experience include:

1. Relationship and proactive engagement and communication
2. Increased customer self-service coupled with amazing people
3. Innovation and flexibility to help customers grow their business

Tell us about your strategic approach to Customer Experience?

Our approach is anchored in creating shared goals with our customers and bringing these goals to life through each of Optus’ strategic pillars.

• For example, in Unique Customer Connections we are committed to fostering strong relationships with our customers, regular connection opportunities and enhanced communications
• We leverage Digital Everywhere to deliver best in class services such as automated reporting, self-service options, and improved response times.
• Lastly, we are equipping our Amazing People, with the skills of the future, to support both their personal growth and in turn, our customers’ needs

I like to focus on achieving the ‘trifecta’, that is delivering for the voice of the customer, the voice of our people and the voice of our leaders/industry. When we pull all these voices together, that is where we see our greatest successes.  success.

Can you share any recent Customer Experience initiatives you’ve delivered?

Over the last six months we’ve continued our focus on our digital and automation journey, creating enhanced connections with our customers so that they can be more efficient and productive, and in turn deliver improved experiences to their customers. Also, in Q1, we delivered our first quarterly Innovation Roadmap webinar, creating a new opportunity to engage with our customers and to share a view of the future. These regular quarterly webinars will help us deepen and broaden our customer relationships, as well as supporting our customers own growth objectives. In July, 80 customers attended, achieving an 86% event satisfaction score. We are hoping for even more attendees at the next webinar on 21 October.

And what is your next goal for Customer Experience in Wholesale?

When it comes to customer expectations, what is considered exceptional today, becomes hygiene tomorrow.

Our teams interact with customers and manage their sentiments daily. Going forward, we are focused on shifting up a gear and linking our customer satisfaction program to our customers’ journeys and measuring end to end sentiment in a way that is business-function agnostic and competitively benchmarked. We’ll then turn these sentiments into actionable insights, delivering continual optimisation for our customers. It’s a continual evolution process.

On a lighter note, we are also finalists in two CX industry best practice awards: the Customer Service Institute of Australia awards for Automated Order Management and the Aston Media CX awards for best use of data to create actionable insights. Achieving finalist status is another testament to our commitment and focus on Customer Experience in OWS, winning the awards would be the icing on the cake!

* Source: Forethought, OWS Customer Satisfaction Survey 2020