Customers love you if you set them free
A new social experiment by LotusFlare and A1 Group has made a shock revelation about customer relationships that will stun many British telcos. If you love customers, you must set them free and they will come back to you. This will come as a massive shock to some UK telcos, who tend to use relationship management tactics akin to stalking and locking their customers up in a basement.
A1 partnered with LotusFlare to run a cloud-native commerce and monetisation service, LotusFlare DNO Cloud, and a created a branded a self-service app to create a new digital service brand called re:do for A1 Group’s Slovenian subsidiary. With re:do in Slovenia, A1 tested the theory that empowering users is a better long term tactic for romancing subscribers. The Slovenian market is a good testbed for testing as the locals are ‘very digitally savvy’ according to a spokesman for A1. The re:do service culture system is especially beneficial to people who crave independence, according to Iliyan Dimitrov, who is described as its Grand Master. Those who respond best are young people that are emancipating from their parents and are first-time purchasing their own mobile subscription and people who just want that things simply work and don’t want to spend long hours on managing their mobile subscription, said Dimitrov.
“re:do is ideal for both those groups because it is exceptionally simple to join and all mobile services can be managed directly from the re:do app. Customers can resolve everything by their own hand,” said Dimitrov, “and this allows them to have the complete freedom, control and transparency they never had before.” The results so far suggest that the best way to keep users is to make users feel wanted, respected and even loved. In the UK, telcos try to do this by setting up an auto response that says, “we value your business” every ten seconds as they spend half an hour in a call centre queue. By contrast, the re:do project with LotusFlare project shows how rewarding it can be to be more thoughtful. Customers, the results seem to suggest, want empathy, they want to be in control of their own destiny and they thrive on responsibility before they respond with loyalty.
There are eight good examples of situations where the telco has empowered the user to sort out their own problems. That sense of control of your own destiny tends to invoke a feel-good factor that is infinitely more powerful and long lasting than a loyal scheme. For example, users can add new mobile lines to their account without having to wait on a call centre operator or transfer their existing number from a rival telco. Taking your business elsewhere is a great feeling of power. In a similar vein, giving users the option to end their mobile phone subscription, should they want to, is a very brave but potentially rewarding gesture.
“The re:do mobile service has been designed for the one who matters to us most, the modern consumer who wants to manage everything by phone in a simple and quick way. It had to be completely user-driven from the outset and was steered by a community of users re:lavnica, who contributed their questions, opinions and suggestions” said an A1 spokesman.
Compare and contrast that to the ghastly experience some broadband customers have in the UK where customers are encouraged to join telcos in order to get a better deal, but if anyone dares to leave they are subjected to the ordeal of dealing with a ‘customer retention team’, which is seemingly trained in psychological torture. A1 Group chose LotusFlare to achieve the opposite to the ghastly UK ‘customer experience’. It was assigned to help launch the new digital brand that “moves the subscriber experience beyond telco,” said Sam Gadodia, CEO and Co-Founder of LotusFlare.
Instead of stripping customers of their dignity and dehumanising them, as UK telcos do, the A1 Group / LotusFlare re:do brand actually likes its subscribers, trusts them and tried to build up their confidence, according to Dimitrov. Then it gives them the tools to do more. There are three confidence building options: LotusFlare has helped re:do created easy to use instructions that give subscribers the power to manage their SIM card, monitor their consumption and download invoices. Having made the user feel better about themselves, re:do hopes to encourage subscribers they are more likely to venture further into the shop and enter into international and roaming agreements.
A happy shopper is likely to recommend the telco to their friends and they have the option to iInvite a friend to join re:do. People use that option because they have faith in the telco not to let them down. In the UK, if you recommended certain broadband providers to friends, you would lose all social credibility and word would get around that you are untrustworthy. “What’s most exciting is that re:do is taking a completely fresh approach and forging a new path,” said LotusFlare CEO Sam Gadodia.