Marc Anné, Vice President, Customer Insight & Advocacy, Orange Business Services

While some of you may now Orange as one of the 50 most recognized brands in the world, perhaps you didn’t know the breadth and depth of Orange Business Services (OBS).

Marc began the presentation highlighting the complexity of Orange Business Services (global telecommunication services) serving over 3750 multinational companies around the globe.

Starting in 2006, one of the benefits that OBS has was a CEO who was a great visionary, who also believed that outstanding customer experience should be central to everything they did. As well, Marc highlighted that they focused on other core cornerstones such as profitable growth, people development and competitive advantage.

One are that Marc noted that OBS performed extremely well at was its agility in times of change. He noted as a telecommunications company, change was something they expected which had made them an extremely flexible organization. This undoubtedly makes Orange a nimble organization for any time and place.

Marc then detailed their customer journey. When they started, he said they did not have a deep understanding of the customer experience. This was in part due to the mergers, which lost some of the “heart of the customer”. This phenomenon does not seem unique to OBS as organizations sometimes lose sight the customer at this very crucial time. In addition, due to the complexity of the relationships with the customers, there was a lack of understanding of who owned the customer relationship -- they had silos of ownership. He also noted that there was a lack of executive ownership at the time, and there were more spectators than doers. As well, there was little link between the customer data and core operations of the business.

So why change? One of the reasons was that they saw a clear difference in revenue growth between loyal vs. non loyal accounts so they realized that customer intimacy was critical to their growth strategy. So they launched a program called “Outstanding Customer Experience” as a transformational program for the business, not a quick fix.

Some of the core tenets of the program were that it helped them improve weak areas, yet also build on their strengths. In addition, it was a pragmatic prioritization – allowing them to focus their actions on areas that were customer priorities.

Marc also outlined two areas that the customer feedback was used for:

1. To focus at the individual customer level – addressing very specific customer issues – by business unit managers, end users etc. This focus was therefore at the account level. He noted that now more than ever in the recession, customers want reassurance and security. Therefore, it was very important to integrate the feedback into the account management rhythm and review process. In addition, OBS monitors this closed loop process very closely, making sure that the service improvement plans get the right people involved. Marc also mentioned the importance of understanding and measuring feedback from various account relationships – decision maker, end user etc – how important it was to get a “representative voice”. OBS also launched a series of initiatives around customer teaming – meaning how a global team can better serve the customer. They found by training employees on these skills, they were able to therefore have better focus on the customer, and hence improved loyalty compared to those teams that had not received this training.
2. A second area OBS is working on is improving overall end to end customer experience. In this area they are taking a broader view incorporating industry analysts, customer boards, as well as loyalty surveys. Through this focus they are making process improvements that will become part of the “natural life” of the company. By increasing efficiency, Marc emphasized that this allowed service managers more time to spend with the customer, which had an impact on customer intimacy.

Finally, Marc also showed some industry benchmarking noting that they are very good against the competition but are part of a “bad industry.” Therefore their comparison should be against ICT providers like IBM, HP, etc.

In summing up, Marc said that the key to an outstanding customer experience requires the following:

• Long term vision
• A structured approach
• Operational buy-in and focus
• Clear communication to employees to help mobilize them
• A focus on continued improvement

In terms of key takeaways, I think OBS has been able to be very focused on their customer intimacy strategy, despite complicated B2B relationships, mergers, economic changes. The story is a great one for all B2B businesses.