Lessons from the road: getting closer to customers

Today, the picture is very different. Customers now want more than a phone. They expect a mobile experience fully tailored to their lifestyles. So, returning to lead DTAC once again on an interim basis, I made it one of my first jobs to travel across Thailand to listen and learn from our customers, understanding now that they’re more varied in their usage and technological capacities than they have ever been.

In Chiang Mai, I visited a call centre, where a man was asking how to access the network and communicate with the call centre via his tablet, rather than his smartphone. Cases like this are becoming increasing common in urban areas. 

Rangsit is now home to thousands of immigrants from Myanmar, all of whom want to be able to call home, and customers like them need to be offered affordable international calling packages. This is doubly true now that we’re also operating in Myanmar.

In Ubon Ratchathani, most still use basic talk-and-text services. Though these customers still comprise 60 per cent of our customer base in Thailand, they will enter the world of mobile data in the very near future and we are prepared for the impending increase in data demand from them as their needs evolve.

Finally there is Bangkok, blazing ahead on the mobile data front. These are the people lighting Thailand’s mobile industry on fire. They are the ones lining up for the latest smartphone releases, video chatting on 4G on the MRT. 

Together they are responsible for turning the country into one of the top global markets for sticker chat apps and games like Candy Crush. They have made Thailand the world’s No 2 YouTube market behind the United States, and have catapulted Bangkok past all other highly wired, industrialised metropoles into the No 1 social media (Facebook) city on the planet. 

In markets like Bangkok, mobile usage has exploded from about 10 minutes per day to more than three hours a day per user, and this pattern shows no signs of slowing as it gradually spreads across the country.

Yes, there is a data revolution happening in Thailand, and alongside it, a major customer evolution. The change in just a few short years has been drastic. The connectivity demands of customers are more varied and nuanced than ever before. The same is true of their expectations of mobile service providers and of their devices – of which they now use a plethora. 

But what customers in Bangkok, Chiang Mail, Rangsit and Ubon Ratchathani all share – whether they are young, digital frontrunners or talk-and-text users in rural areas – is that, again, they are buying a phone and an experience. It does not matter to them what goes into the phone. Just that it works, and works the way they want and expect it to. They no longer care so much about which SIM card powers them. 

But in my industry, companies have to stand out in the SIM. Our company, our network, our people and our service are part of the SIM. So, our challenge – and certainly one that applies to other companies in very different industries – is how to design a customer service system and culture that works for an increasingly wide array of customers and connectivity needs.

We are tackling this with a combination of solutions. We are becoming more granular in our approach to our customers. We are going directly to them, we are operating close to where they actually live and work and we are applying cluster modelling that accounts for their countless differences and segmentation. 

Businesses should no longer look at average figures or treat people like average customers, and we maintain that developing customer listening skills will go a long way for a company. We can build our listening skills by decentralising ourselves to understand what’s happening as locally as possible. 

At the same time, we are more closely integrating the divisions in our organisation so that we’re talking to each other, staying flexible and constantly changing the way we work in an industry that is itself constantly changing. 

These measures are certainly not easy in big mobile companies or in any major industry, but they represent the right way forward for us. It’s what will allow us and the industry to give Thailand customers exactly the experience, the service and the products they want and need. And then they will care.

 

Sigve Brekke is the interim chief executive officer of Total Access Communications (DTAC).