6 Questions on Customer Centricity with TELUS

**This post is part of a series with B/OSS Publisher Danica Cullins around pertinent industry matters, called "6 Questions." Invited responses to six uniform questions will be published regularly on the B/OSS website. Respondents will represent the full industry circle (service providers, consultants, solutions providers, etc.) First topic: customer-centricity. Please click here to see how Pegasystems' Tom Erskine answered the same questions or here to see how Hannu Savolainen of TeliaSonera answered them.

Respondent’s Name: Carol Borghesi
Respondent’s Title: SVP, Customers First Culture
Respondent’s Company Name: TELUS

1. What role do you play at your company in driving the focus on customer experience, and how does your company practice customer centricity internally?

As the senior vice president of Customers First Culture at TELUS, my title gets a lot of interesting commentary, especially since I now report to the executive vice president of Human Resources. This is not the usual path for a left-brained operations person like me, but after 30 years in this industry I’ve come to realize that putting customers first is in fact all about culture. At TELUS, I am responsible for overseeing the changes to processes, policies and procedures that will enable us to truly put customers first.

As an example, we’ve declared customer experience to be a team sport, where everybody – and I do mean everybody – is responsible for allocating half of their personal-performance objectives to support our goal of being the most recommended company in the markets we serve. As far as I know, this is a first in our industry, and I think it’s one of the most important changes we’ve made.

TELUS has a strong track record in terms of finances, infrastructure investment, governance, and the brainpower of its people, so for us it’s about building on a culture that’s already firing on all cylinders and bringing into sharper focus something that is meaningful to everybody at TELUS – our customers.

This means we must be customer-centric. To do this, we realize that we are all in service to one another based on our functional accountabilities whether it’s network design, sales or direct customer service. We all have a responsibility to deliver on our mantra of doing what we said we’d do, when we said we’d do it, for the price we said we’d do it for. This will keep our customers coming back. At the same time, it’s also important for everyone at TELUS to get closer to the customer. Throughout 2011, approximately 3,000 TELUS team members participated in customer-first day. This was an opportunity to experience the “frontlines" for themselves, taking them from their day-to-day roles to job shadow a frontline team member – and to further the customers-first approach across our organization.