Voice of the Customer

Transcription

1 Business Intelligence Network Research Report Voice of the Customer Text Analytics for the Responsive Enterprise SPSS CUSTOMER CASE STUDY: CABLECOM GMBH By Seth Grimes BeyeNETWORK th Street Suite 310 Boulder, CO

2 TABLE OF CONTENTS SPSS Customer Case Study: Cablecom GmbH 1 Company Overview 1 Business Drivers: A Focus on Satisfaction 1 Requirements and Methodology 1 Business Integration 2 Business Benefits 3 Lessons Learned 3 Author Information 4 All Rights Reserved

3 SPSS CUSTOMER CASE STUDY: CABLECOM GMBH COMPANY OVERVIEW Cablecom is the largest cable network operator in Switzerland. The company provides its customers with services for cable television, broadband Internet access, and mobile and fixed network telephony. As of March 31, 2008, Cablecom had over 1.5 million television customers, of which 300,000 made use of the digital service, 468,000 were Internet customers (high speed) and 298,000 were telephony customers (digital phone). The company also provides voice, data and value-added services for business customers. And Cablecom supplies cable network operators with facility construction as well as with application and transmission services for television, telephony and Internet. The company s own network connects around 1.9 million households and supplies all the larger towns in Switzerland. At the end of December the company had around 1,500 employees and its turnover was over 1 billion Swiss francs. Cablecom is a national subsidiary of UPC Broadband, the European cable network group of Liberty Global Inc. BUSINESS DRIVERS: A FOCUS ON SATISFACTION Cablecom has maintained its market position as Switzerland s largest cable network operator via an intent focus on customer satisfaction. But while superior service and happy customers are ends in themselves, they are also the key to profitability in competitive, mature markets such as Cablecom s. Cablecom had gone through a period of rapid expansion, with acquisition of new customers driving revenue growth and profitability. However, as the company s market matured as customer-acquisition opportunities diminished staff turned their attention to customer retention. According to Federico Cesconi, Cablecom s director of business intelligence (BI), the company has found that retention is linked directly to service quality and satisfaction; hence, the IT mandate became detecting quality issues and those customers who were not completely happy. REQUIREMENTS AND METHODOLOGY Cablecom had six years of experience working with analytics vendor SPSS as documented in published case studies. Nonetheless, when it came time to extend customer-retention efforts to textual data sources, Cesconi and team surveyed the vendor marketplace to find the solution that would best help them meet business needs. They identified other potential suppliers but chose to proceed with an SPSS solution based on the Cablecom s strong, satisfied business relationship with SPSS in Cesconi s words, SPSS is not really a supplier, but a partner and the SPSS products technical capabilities. Further, Cablecom found that adding text mining to an existing SPSS Clementine solution is not so expensive. Expense, in this case, is measured not only in software licensing cost; expense calculations should include the All Rights Reserved 1

4 BUSINESS INTEGRATION cost of staff training and ongoing operations. Cablecom faced modest additional costs due to the integration of text analytics capabilities into the familiar Clementine interface. Cablecom s Voice of the Customer (VoC) work, aimed at boosting customer retention, is carried out primarily by an internal staff of 15. It is part of an Enterprise Feedback Management (EFM) effort that encompasses text-analytics and also use of the NetPromoter Score, which provides a mechanism for measuring customer attitudes. The effort allows the company to generate categories of drivers of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, with segmentation according to customer lifetime value and NetPromoter-measured satisfaction. Cablecom has several years experience with data mining. Staff had achieved good predictive accuracy with a variety of churn models, but they began to see the limitations of data mining the need to go beyond numbers to understand customer emotions. Cablecom staff had found particularly useful the unstructured information free-text, verbatim responses collected in surveys, but non-automated analysis was very cost ineffective, an obstacle overcome via Voice of the Customer text analytics. The company now initiates online and interactive voice-response surveys. Survey outreach is triggered by events such as a call-center inquiry and the customer s reaching a certain point in the product life cycle. Automating analyses with SPSS text analytics has enabled Cablecom to extend EFM scope to accommodate approximately 20,000 feedback items per month. Plans include extending VoC text analytics to blogs and online forums. Voice of the Customer-driven retention is a high-priority, high-visibility initiative for Cablecom. NetPromoter adoption was at the CEO s instigation, and consolidated VoC findings are reported monthly to the company s Board of Directors. BI Director Federico Cesconi had in the past been responsible for customer relationship management (CRM) analytics. Cablecom s Chief Financial and Marketing Officers decided to create an independent BI unit, led by Cesconi, tasked to work with a variety of business units. The BI unit has two groups: one focused on business insights linked to operations and finance; and the second, a customer insights group that measures business key performance indicators (KPIs) from the customer s point of view. Executive visibility is important, but it s action that produces tangible results. Cablecom s Voice of the Customer initiative produces actionable information. There are two streams: 1. Cablecom s VoC findings help identify operational gaps and directly support process improvement. 2. Cablecom s VoC findings are part of a one-to-one support initiative where the company reaches out to customers with issues customers who are All Rights Reserved 2

5 dissatisfied or likely to terminate their service in a personalized effort to fix problems. This form of interaction is expensive, but the cost is justified by retention results. BUSINESS BENEFITS LESSONS LEARNED Cablecom has seen a tremendous improvement in churn and customer satisfaction according to Director of Business Intelligence Federico Cesconi. The company quantified results. It assessed the effect of its personalized call-back effort by studying 1,200 cases two months after call-back. Findings showed that this VoCdriven step would reverse customer-satisfaction problems in 55% of cases. Customers who rated their satisfaction at 0-6 on a ten-point scale could be boosted to an 8-10 point score. Cablecom s Federico Cesconi reports that the company s Voice of the Customer work generated a lot of surprises findings and results that were not anticipated including that the customer has a totally different point of view about your business from staff s view. He cites an example that he and colleagues had always thought it was important to solve customer problems very, very fast. Customer feedback showed, however, that for certain problems, the customer can wait, that what s most important is that when we solve problems, we keep our promise. Cesconi offers the lesson that organizations should account for both the business and the customer points of view. When Cesconi discusses Cablecom VoC initiatives with contacts in other industries, he recommends careful structuring of Enterprise Feedback Management efforts. For instance, some organizations think that use of an online tool such as Survey Monkey is enough. Cesconi, by contrast, finds immense value in Cablecom s comprehensive EFM approach. The goal is not simply to collect feedback. You need to be able to enhance the customer experience. All Rights Reserved 3

6 AUTHOR INFORMATION SETH GRIMES Seth Grimes is a business intelligence, data warehousing, and decision systems expert. He founded Washington D.C.-based Alta Plana Corporation in 1997 and consults on business intelligence and analytics strategy and implementation for clients in the U.S. and internationally. In addition to consulting, Seth writes and speaks on data management and analysis systems, industry trends and emerging analytical technologies. Seth is Text Analytics Channel Expert for the Business Intelligence Network and a Data Warehousing Institute instructor. He is founding chair of the Text Analytics Summit series, dating to Seth can be reached at grimes@altaplana.com, ALTA PLANA CORPORATION 7300 Willow Avenue Takoma Park, MD altaplana.com All Rights Reserved 4