Ever wanted to know what a customer service associate is writing about you after a particularly difficult call? Want to make sure they wrote down exactly what you told them to? That’s the future that Telstra envisions under a new strategy announced this week: give you control over the notes on your account.
It’s part of Telstra’s “Digital First” strategy, which basically means a plan to do cool stuff for customers with apps, social media and contact centres in a bid to improve customer service. The telco has experienced success with engagement on social media as well as the popular Live Chat functionality to resolve simple queries like international roaming and bill balance, now it wants to do better on other digital stuff.
A concept Telstra’s head of digital outlined a potential future where customers could control their own account notes to get more meaningful interactions between themselves and contact centres.
“If we share those contact notes we can be transparent, and being transparent is a really good thing,” Telstra’s head of Digital, Gerd Schenkel said yesterday.
“I would expect us to give customers as much power as possible. It’s ctually quite a nice conversation. Let’s say there was a conversation between a customer and an agent; then there might be a notes difference between the two after tha call. As opposed to waiting for the next bill to find out your problem wasn’t solved, wouldn’t you prefer as a customer right after the call to fix the misunderstanding immediately?,” he added.
Telstra also wants to give people access to real-time billing info in the future, but getting the company’s systems talking to each other to make it happen is still proving difficult.
“Real-time billing has been in development for some time. It’s technically challenging, but would provide us with another tool to use with customers. Bridging of the network systems and service systems is quite a task because traditionally they were built separately,” Schenkel said.
What would you want to see out of your telco for better customer service?