EE, BT, O2 and XLN Scoop UK Customer Experience Awards

Broadband ISPs and telecoms operators EE, BT, O2 and XLN Telecom have picked up several wins at the annual UK Customer Experience Awards 2018, which is one of those internal industry focused events that may not properly reflect independent feedback or opinions from actual consumers.

The Awards, which were last week handed out at Wembley Stadium in London, broadly aim to recognise companies that are making and focusing on improvements toward “delivering an outstanding customer experience.” This is said to be “made up of the customer journey, the multiple touchpoints the customer interacts with, and the numerous channels and environments the customer encounters both online and offline.”

Each entrant is expected to submit a written application and make a presentation to explain why they deserve to win any given category. After that they’re reviewed by a large panel of judges, which is made up of various “independent and impartial business professionals” from across the industry who score each entry. Very little in the way of independent customer feedback is involved (i.e. take with a pinch of salt).

The event covers a lot of different categories and thus we’ve chosen to only include those below with a consumer telecoms operator as one of the winners.

UK Customer Experience Awards 2018 (Winners)

Category: Best Contact centre large
Winner: EE

“We’ve successfully onshored all EE contact centres, so 100% of calls are now answered in the UK and Ireland. And for our Welsh-speaking customers, we can also offer the option to speak with a Welsh language agent. To build on this personal offering, we’ve also changed the culture of our contact centres. For example, we’re launching new augmented reality (AR) tools, EE Remote Support and Virtual Support, so agents can provide tailored remote customer support.”

Category: Best Customer centric culture – Customer Focus
Winner: BT Enterprise (partnership with Bluesky)

“BT Enterprise looked to transform Customer experience and drive value through their service teams. Great Conversations, a leader-led climate and culture transformation programme was developed for their service centres with support from Blue Sky. Medallia and Accenture then provided the Customer feedback and Insight solution to bring the training to life and support the embedding.”

Category: Best Customer centric culture – Strategy/Project
Winner: O2

“Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and increasing competition, O2 stands laser-focused on one thing: the customer. O2 is committed to ensuring a significant proportion of the UK population has an exceptional customer experience. Rising to the occasion, O2’s launched and embedded a revolutionary “Customer Led” business strategy. The result: O2 has maintained its market leading position for post pay customer loyalty amongst mobile network operators. An achievement to be proud of.”

Category: Best customer experience training – Transformation for success
Winner: BT Enterprise (partnership with Bluesky)

“BT Enterprise looked to transform Customer experience and drive value through their service teams. Great Conversations, a leader-led climate and culture transformation programme was developed for their service centres with support from Blue Sky. Medallia and Accenture then provided the Customer feedback and Insight solution to bring the training to life and support the embedding.”

Category: Best Customers at the heart of everything – Customer Satisfaction
Winner: XLN Telecom (Business Services)

Category: Best Technology & telecoms
Winner: EE

“Following a series of customer interviews and research on how EE customers use mobile data, we validated a customer need to share data allowance with others. In November 2017, we launched Data Gifting, a My EE self-service proposition, allowing account holders with >1 subscription to move data between them if one is running low or out of data. How? Simply open the My EE app, select who to gift the data from/to, select amount and tap “Gift”.”

Category: Best Use of insight & feedback – Best Solution or Programme
Winner: BT Consumer

“Our innovative solution has enabled both customer service teams and central teams (e.g. product management) to revolutionise how they use customer insight and feedback to deliver improvements to customer experience. The solution is unique as it combines the use of analytics and algorithms to target specific calls and provides full functionality to listen to and assess the call, track coaching actions, and raise business issues to fix. The solution has enabled BT Consumer to significantly improve customer experience and reduce industry complaints to record low levels.”

Category: CX team of the year – Customer Centricity
Winner: BT Consumer

“The BT Group Planning team was recently formed by bringing together contact planning, delivery and infrastructure, as well as reporting and analysis teams from BT and EE, to create a best of all worlds team with the capability to transform customer experience. Through sharing skills, knowledge, tools and practices the team have collaborated and innovated to deliver a number of projects which have accelerated BT Consumer customer experience strategy improving Net Promoter Score, reducing industry complaints to record low levels and improving operational effectiveness in the process.”

Category: CX team of the year – Strategy/Transformation
Winner: O2

“Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty and competition, O2 wanted to go further for customers. O2’s Customer Experience team (CX) needed to find out what customers cared about, and overhaul the business to exceed their expectations. The team used ground-breaking insights and collaborated across the company to embed a “Customer Led” strategy. The result: O2 has maintained its market leading position for post pay customer loyalty amongst mobile network operators.”

We should point out that XLN, BT Corporate, O2 and other telecoms operators’ were also runners-up in several categories.