While much of the technology focus at the Billing & OSS World Conference & Expo was on transformation, a panel of operators and experts found transformation to be a tool for reaching a higher goal: changing the mindset of an organization to focus on the customer experience.

Jeff Boozer, vice president of sales and marketing at Martin Group, led a plenary session at the conference called “It’s More than Acquisition and Retention ... It’s About Experience.” He urged panelists to explain how their companies were reorganizing around that experience.

Reorganization and the Customer Experience

Perhaps most familiar with reorganization was Laurinda Pang, vice president of customer experience engineering at Global Crossing, who said, “Global Crossing has an interesting background, which includes bankruptcy, so we got very good as an organization at hugging our customers.”

She added that given the amount of system integration the company underwent as an enterprise built on acquisition, maintaining that focus was a challenge. “So we went to the customer and asked them what they wanted us to focus on — and we did,” Pang said.

Other panelists were Paul Hughes, vice president of enabling technologies and service provider software solutions at Yankee Group; Skip Kline, provisioning architecture analyst at Cox Communications; and Ashvin Vellody, director of enterprise architecture at U.S. Cellular.

Hughes said the reorganization has become essential to achieving a strategic focus on the customer. “It becomes more critical to look more aggressively at becoming more efficient. Because the more efficient you are, the better you can serve the customer.”

And Hughes wasn’t talking only about technology and systems, but about people. “It takes a paradigm shift in the way that departments think because there is a need to think consistently about how to address these issues. If you want to be customer-centric, everyone has to be on board.”

Anyone who has ever worked for a company run by current U.S. Cellular CEO Jack Rooney knows this concept well. He has taken the customer satisfaction mantra wherever he goes. “When Jack Rooney took over our company, there were drastic changes to keep us focused on a satisfaction strategy,” Vellody said.

And Rooney now has taken customer satisfaction to this new level of experience. “For us, experience is about one-on-one interaction. The call center is one touch point, but the Web site is another and so are the bill and the visit by a technician. Any time you get to service the customer, that’s how we classify experience,” Vellody said.

Cox’s Kline said that part of his job at the technology level is to allow those positive interactions to take place. “I didn’t think a browser would be the killer app it is until it evolved into a multimedia tool on the Internet by crossing over and integrating with a lot of other forms of communication. “Now it’s a way for us to bring all the complexity together at the customer level and have it understandable at various levels,” he said.

Network, IT and the Customer

Vellody and Kline work in the engineering realm, so it is telling about their organizations and the industry as a whole that the importance of the customer experience has indeed made it into operations as well as customer service. Hughes said, "Reality has created a tighter link between network and IT and the customer by forcing them to look at the entire order-to-cash process in a whole new way.”

Pang agrees that the days of measuring customer satisfaction is over. “We have been measuring customer satisfaction for years. If 98 percent say they are satisfied, what do you do with that? It doesn’t mean they are buying more. It doesn’t mean they will recommend you to others,” she said.

So instead, Global Crossing focuses on all its customer touch points. And to make sure, as all panelists stated, that an entire organization is up for the changes together, Pang has this solution: “Make sure they feel like they have skin in the game by making sure they feel it in their pocket. Tie their bonuses to it.”

Read Billing World’s exclusive interview with Global Crossing’s Laurinda Pang: “The Rise of the Customer Experience Officer.”