Colt remains Best in Class Telco for customer satisfaction  

Published by Colt Technology Services on November 6, 2017

Colt closed out its Q3 2017 Relationship NPS (Net Promoter Score) at a record 41, a nine point improvement against Q2 2017.  A score of 41 maintains Colt as the Best in Class Telco in the Satmetrix (the Net Promoter Score authority) EU B2B Benchmark.  NPS is the leading customer experience metric for all industries and is often used as a leading indicator for growth, and an anchor for the customer experience management (CEM) program.

We may be Best in Class, but there’s still work to do. Our vision is to become the most customer oriented business in the industry but that’s just the start.  If you look at any company’s website, vision or mission statement you’ll see something similarly customer focused: “extra mile; through your eyes; heartbeat of what we do…“  You cannot tell a great service company by what they put in their mission statement, you need to make it concrete, take it beyond words and into action. Ultimately it’s about building trust – but trust isn’t something you can just ask for. These customer experience scores matter to us as it’s our customers who are telling us we are on the right track, each point improvement is earned by getting less wrong and more right for them, day in and day out. Ultimately, our customers are defining the experience they get from us.

At its simplest, we are making more people happy with the service we deliver at the points that matter to them – that has to be a good thing. (It also helps that it pays.)

In an increasingly interconnected world what we do matters for our customers more than ever, connectivity matters and our customers demand great service to back that up. As my CEO, Carl Grivner, answered recently in a company-wide meeting: “What’s the most important thing to do to win the next big deal? It’s simple, deliver on the last one.”

We are not content to stop at being the Best in Class Telco – that’s a necessary step and a great achievement from where we started – but it is just base camp. We are only part of the way on our journey and we are now moving on for our assault of the summit –  an NPS of 60 by 2020. That’s the new standard we are aiming for and we are not going to be constrained by an industry with notoriously poor customer experience and we are not going to be constrained by the fact we are a B2B provider.

From an experience perspective, B2B is dead. We need to reset our competitive benchmarks. At the start of our journey I used to say we were not competing with the likes of Amazon. Well, that might have been right then but it’s wrong now. We are competing every day, at every point in the customer lifecycle, with the experience you had with the speakers you bought online, the last time you took something back to a shop, stopped at the Genius bar, went to test drive a car, hailed a cab, did your banking on the way to work, booked a hotel, checked into it, and even got a 30 min slot on a Prime delivery for that thing the algorithm knew would have a bloody good chance of meeting your needs. We owe it to our customers to step up and match that experience. If the leaders in these B2C sectors can consistently score 60+ NPS, why can’t we?

So, we will keep on listening and keep on getting better, keep on understanding more about our customers and continue to adapt, learn and improve based on what they tell us. We will continue to let our customers define the experience they want from us and we will continue to invest in innovating and differentiating on service at the points that matter most, providing choice throughout the lifecycle and putting our customers in control.  We will set the New Standard for experience.

Peter Richmond is Director of Customer Experience at Colt

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