Perhaps there’s no more important business imperative today than examining and improving your customer experience (CX). An improved CX drives long term customer loyalty and improves lifetime customer value. But beyond the business benefits, providing a great CX is just the right thing to do.
The one component of your business that plays the most important role in delivering a great CX is your team. As a result, one proven strategy for delivering a great CX is facilitating a great employee experience. After all, happy and engaged employees treat and engage customers better.
Unfortunately, many organizations are coming up short with employee engagement. According to market research firm Gallup, only 20% of employees worldwide and 36% in the U.S. fall in the “engaged” category. Business news headlines can make it appear as if there are more “quiet quitters” than engaged employees these days.
The pandemic has certainly impacted engagement and should act as a motivator for management teams to make employee engagement a priority. Leaders are challenged to actually lead on this issue and not just make it an “HR” thing.
Raising the Bar on Employee Experience
A great employee experience begins with an organization’s culture and values. That culture should embrace and practice values that include empathy, care, purpose, and trust. When employees feel these values all along the employee journey, their engagement level increases. And with higher engagement, comes more satisfaction, ultimately leading to a better CX.
Great employee engagement and experience is accomplished with more than just culture and values, though. Businesses should also ensure employees have the right tools at their disposal to better serve customers. Those tools should be intuitive and enable employees to serve and assist customers quickly and competently.
For service providers, the foundational tools for a great employee and customer experience are operational support systems (OSS), including billing platforms. These software platforms power much of the backend systems that manage a broadband provider’s operations.
OSS platforms touch much of the customer journey, and employees must use these platforms to serve customers on a daily basis. These platforms should enable automated and streamlined processes that both help employees serve customers better and help customers easily do business with the operator.
As operators look to put the focus on employee engagement and experience, one important tool in the toolbox is a modern, intuitive, and efficient billing and OSS platform. Good luck!
Tony Stout, CTO
CDG
Tony Stout joined PRTC in 2010 and serves as the company’s Chief Technology Officer. In his role as CTO, Tony is responsible for overseeing strategic direction for building and expanding PRTC’s next generation network infrastructure. In 2020, PRTC acquired CDG, a telecom OSS/BSS solutions provider. Tony was appointed CTO for CDG and oversees the company’s technology, software engineering, IT and technical support teams. Tony has more than 28 years of technology, business and management experience in various Telecom and Information Technology roles.
