KPN is considered the best by potential customers in the WUA research on online orientation for signing up for a sim only subscription (February 2017) and also the best in the research on signing up for a mobile subscription with device (January 2017). In this interview, a conversation with Peter Sonke, Director Online KPN and Telfort. About merging service and sales departments, automation, internet of things, the ultimate goal of a +40 NPS and the shift from buy to build.
Peter Sonke, congratulations on winning these two WUA studies in the telecom sector. How important do you find it to be the best in the digital arena?
Sonke: "As KPN, we have the ambition to be the best service provider in the Netherlands by 2020. Not only in the telecom industry, but also in other sectors. The online domain becomes crucial in this. For both sales and service, you see that many more interactions with customers are being digitized. So it's crucial to score well there to give substance to our ambition for 2020."
What role does having a winning mentality play in this?
"Online craftsmanship is an important ingredient to become the best service provider. We also invest a lot in that, we're continuously working on it. I assume that my people spend at least 1 to 2 days per month on training. We've also developed training paths for every function, where we've distinguished three expertise levels per relevant competency. Level 1 is basic, level 2 is intermediate and level 3 is expert. The intention is that every online professional in our teams reaches level 3 on all relevant competencies."
What is your approach, what goes so well?
"I think our brand in combination with our 4p-Complete offering does a lot. I believe your research also shows that the Brand theme is an important driver behind digital success. That's really the merit of our marketing organization. For the digital domain, our approach has shifted from buy to build. So building yourself and being at the controls, that's how you make the difference."
What can other digital leaders learn from your approach?
"Some companies might not yet see the online channel as mature or large enough to set up their own team or to outsource a lot of the activities. In my view, it's crucial that you build digital capabilities yourself: through the line, end to end. Whether it's your front-end, online media or your development: I believe that if you have or want to have any scale, you need to have all of that in your own hands. Once you have that in your own hands, you need to bring it together: we've set up teams that are multidisciplinary and responsible end-to-end.
"Some then say: 'oh, you work agile'. It's not so much about whether you call that agile, it's about giving people autonomy over a certain part of the customer journey and having them together make their part of the customer journey a bit better every day. Whether they do that via the scrum method or not, I don't really care. Give responsibility and organize autonomy, then you make progress! It starts with placing good people and giving them the space to do their work. People who sit in meetings more than 6 hours per week can report that to me. I think that's a waste of time, energy and creativity. And if they're in meetings with more than 7 people, apart from department meetings, that might not be very good either. Just do it! With fewer meetings but more collaboration.
"And furthermore... keep testing. You can get quite far by improving incrementally. You at WUA show that to customers daily too. There are people who believe you can create big bangs online. The silver bullet thinking: put it down and then it's good and finished. The lesson for me is: you start with a 7 or 8 and you steadily make a 9 or 10 out of that. There's no point in developing something until you think it's a 9 and only then going live. Sometimes you have to take some risks and then you optimize. Whether that's your front-end or your customer experience after the ordering process: the experience doesn't stop at the website. It's also about how that package arrives on your doormat.
"If only your order goes very well and then the box or the technician doesn't come on time, then it was all for nothing. Changing that, so that the customer experience is really good through the line, that's the challenge and you have to do that with others. The nice thing is that you can also apply the online way of thinking, that everything is data-driven, to the non-online parts of your customer experience. So you can also optimize those and that has brought us a lot of success!"
From a consumer perspective, there should be no (more) difference between service and sales. Are you able to break through the silos at KPN or: are you planning to do that?
"Last year we brought sales and service closer together through a reorganization. With the reorganization we broke through the sales and service silos, so we're now 1 team. It's about helping the customer. Whether you help them install a product or with an invoice question, or help them choose a new product; in principle you could just call sales service too. You have to help the customer make the best choice, that's one.
"Second: I think e-commerce as an online discipline was more mature than e-care. You now see that it becomes increasingly important to also lift your e-care to a higher level and for that you're going to use the techniques and craftsmanship that you already use for e-commerce. Service incidentally also had a number of things better organized than e-commerce. They're much better at NPS management, while e-commerce mainly focuses on conversion. You now let those two merge, and the funny thing is: service is also a funnel just like e-commerce is a funnel. So you're going to apply that funnel thinking to e-care too: helping a customer well is also a conversion. You just measure that conversion in a CES, or in an NPS!
"If you look from a distance at people who do e-commerce or e-care well, they have the same competencies in my opinion. They're data-driven, very focused on customer experience and UX and good and understandable content. I think we've steered them too much toward one thing on one side and too much toward the other on the other side in the past. But it's now coming together and for the customer it's just 1 KPN and 1 Telfort."
What role does customer research and putting the customer first play in your daily work and with the teams that fall under your responsibility?
"It all starts and ends with the customer. Of course you have your customer feedback systems in all your journeys, that can be Usabilla, but it can also be what you get from web care, chat logs, surveys that express the CES. We really have many sources to map out what the customer experiences online.
"In addition, each of my people goes with a technician at least 1 day per quarter, sits in a call center, joins a chat agent or stands in a store. We do that to be able to look our customers in the eyes. And last month we set up a UX lab for the first time! All customer research now also takes place within the walls of KPN. Customers are increasingly coming to us and we're increasingly seeking out customers.
"When we make a new design for an app, my environment, or another online touchpoint, we always make multiple variants and always test it with a panel, but we also a/b test everything. It's crucial for us to involve the customer in product development, in improving flows. I also try to contribute to that. For example, I read the open answers from customers who have ordered something from us or logged a comment in Usabilla every week. I try to set aside an hour per week for that. That's what I do to make sure I know what our customers think of the flows. Every Monday we have a stand-up, both for service and for sales, where we discuss the NPS and CES for all our online touchpoints. We then link actions to that. Then you make it alive; customer research is part of our regular management."
What KPIs do you use in the digital area, which levers do you mainly pull to excel digitally?
"With service it's naturally about NPS and CES, and we've divided those scores over different buckets. Those are 'containers' with reasons why customers contact us. That can be about installation, usage, billing or about outages. On all those buckets we have KPIs on NPS and CES, and then we link improvement initiatives to see if that's successful. We actually have another derived KPI, which we call the no call rate, specifically for service. That no call rate makes clear what percentage of visitors after an online visit still had reason to contact our customer service. We have the philosophy: the customer is in control themselves, so then you should really be able to do everything yourself as a customer. That's not the case today, but that is our ambition.
"It's our goal to have an NPS of +40 on all customer journeys in two years. We're already quite close to that for certain customer journeys, but you can imagine that the NPS for outages is still below 0..."
Ambitious... is that really possible in your opinion, an NPS of +40 for KPN on all customer journeys?
"I believe so. If we start using predictive techniques, you can predict outages much better, for example. I should already be able to know if someone has bad wifi at home. The moment I know you have bad wifi, I can wait until you contact me yourself. But I can also make sure the problem disappears. The question is whether I'll inform you or not, or whether I'll just arrange it. I believe you can also get to +40 for outages, but then you have to shift from reactive to proactive."
What are your digital challenges for 2017?
"A challenge always remains good people. Attracting and retaining online talent. The other challenge is communicating more relevantly. Three years ago we started with personalization. In an earlier interview with you I said: 'Creativity and UX are just as important as data'. To this day I still think that. That doesn't mean I don't believe in data, but data must be actionable. The challenge remains to keep connecting UX, creativity and data so that you remain relevant to the customer and it's not creepy. You have to remain surprisingly relevant. I see that as a challenge we all have as digital professionals.
"The third challenge is: what should we do in 2 to 3 years? I believe we're going toward a different interface with customers, I think that in 2 to 3 years we'll be much more voice-driven. Your voice won't become the dominant interface, a new interface will be added. In addition, I believe the messenger interface will continue to grow, I don't know yet if that will become a super relevant interface for telecom for sales, but certainly for service. So you have to prepare for the rise of the new interfaces. Consumers are increasingly going to interact screenless. You have to think about that and experiment with it.
What digital innovations are you working on now and what developments are on the roadmap?
"We're naturally always looking at the emergence of new interfaces, and asking ourselves to what extent they can help us bring customers to an NPS of +40.
What do you think is The Next Big Thing in digital in your market?
"I think technological innovations are following each other so quickly at the moment that we're at the beginning of a new revolution. But it's very difficult to know if a dominant technique will emerge. Automation is going to do a lot, predictive use of data to improve your service too.
"There seems to be a kind of dominant thinking that Google, Facebook and Amazon are going to call the shots worldwide within the digital domain. But in my view this could also be an Asian player. The Next Big Thing is going to come from Asia. I'm convinced of that. I believe they in Asia might be helped by the fact that they can skip certain steps. If you look now at super apps they already have in China, like Wechat, with which you can order a taxi, have your clothes picked up for dry cleaning and even do your groceries. That's not even here yet!
"Furthermore, I think the Internet of Things will have a lot of influence on how we lead our lives and how we do business. I think this technology will enable people to organize their lives even more efficiently. I think technology will ensure that you can further take care of consumers. Your car that just makes its own appointment for its maintenance. It goes from reactive to proactive. Now you see a lot of social discussions about the fact that many jobs are going to disappear, that's also going to happen, but so much will come back for that. What are those people going to do whose lives have become more efficient? To date, every new technological revolution has led to the creation of new jobs and sectors. And a larger leisure industry.
What is your ultimate goal and dream to achieve in business?
"An NPS of +40 on all KPN customer journeys. That includes a customer effort score of around 80! Then you've organized it well! That's a goal where I want to be in 2-2.5 years and we're going to succeed in that. The online flows will be so good, so relevant, that there's no reason for a customer to use other channels. Except for maybe 10% of interactions, or 10% where you have a complex task with a somewhat less digitally savvy customer."
