Company: du

Contact: Samya Chahin (Director Digital Self Service)

Lithy category: Excellence in Customer Satisfaction

About our team: Digital Business

Our goal is to drive the digital revolution for our customers and our business. We will do this by offering a seamless, excellent experience across all our digital channels, as well as finding smarter digital solutions that offer the greatest value.

About du

du started operating in 2007, offering mobile and fixed telephony, broadband connectivity and IPTV services. Today, we serve more than 7.5 million individual customers and over 80,000 businesses in the UAE. We also provide carrier services for businesses and satellite up/downlink services for TV broadcasters.

Our customer satisfaction initiatives

We see all of our digital channels, including du Community, as an opportunity to improve customer satisfaction. Our aim is to set the standard for service providers in the UAE by giving customers the best experience online. 2015 was a period of intense investment in our digital channels to improve customer satisfaction, take away pain points and reduce the need to queue in stores or at our call centres:

Revamping our online self-service channel ‘My Account’ – to offer 50+ online self-service features – resulting in 25% increase in users in just six months:

Added flexibility – quick and easy way to change plans
Greater transparency – view payment and usage history
Trouble shooting – allowing customers better manage spending and resolve queries
Only UAE telecom to allow customers to renew personal ID online – previously customers had to queue in store to renew ID in person to comply with the country’s strict ‘My Number My Identity’ requirements.

Offered queue jumping service on du App

We’ve reduced their waiting time in du stores by allowing customers to forward book appointments on du App. Customers can book appointments up to two hours before visiting a du store and ensure they’re next to be seen on arrival – minimizing their wait time. Nearly 12K customers saved time using the service in the first 3 months.

du App revamp

A major revamp of du App added new functionalities and a vastly improved user experience as it moved from hybrid to native. This resulted in a 37% increase in downloads of the du App – encouraging customers to switch to a more convenient way of paying for and managing their services.

Positive customer satisfaction indicators from our digital initiatives in 2015

The most important customer issue we were looking to solve via Lithium implementation

We want our customers to spend time on the things that matter most to them, not queueing in our stores or on the phone to our call centers. Like any major service provider we experience an unnecessarily high volume of customers visiting, these channels which is a good spend neither of their time, or efficient operationally for our business. Our Community allows us to remedy this problem by solving basic problems for customers.

We also believe communities build trust between brands and people. Engage in two-way conversations with our customers is essential to building relationships with them. Our Community allows us to be more open as an organization, listen to our customers, help them and act on their advice to improve service and drive innovation.

In 2015 the main focus for us was to understand community’s member need and to encourage community to help each other and make it easier for them to find solutions. We believe word of mouth is key to spread trust with du and the Community is the ideal place for this.

Results:

Community is giving the opportunity to du employees to interact with customers directly, in a less formal way, which facilitates better discussion and shows we are more open as a brand. This gives us a deeper understanding of their needs and accordingly improve our services as per customer expectation. We are now starting an ‘ask the experts programme’ with leaders in our organization facing live questions on the community.

Compared to 2014, we observed an increase of completed registrations by 84% and an increase of unique visits by 207% by end of 2015 – indicating value to our customers.

The idea section in the Community proved very successful. This gave customers an opportunity to share ideas, observations and suggestions for improvements. A dedicated team have been assigned to look into over 100 ideas shared, with 35% likely to be taken forward to fulfill the customers needs.

These ideas also contribute to the Ruler of Dubai’s vision for the city to be the happiest in the world. The team assigned to Community team also share the responsibility of working with the eGovernment smart initiative to collect from the public ideas and comments to participate in building the future of Dubai. This helps maximize the value of each idea shared.

Our metrics

Since we launched du Community, our customer contact base measure, which presents the number of customer complaints received through shops and contact centers versus subscriber base has decreased from December 2014 to December 2015 by 5%.

NPS scores for online channels:

The first Community value analytics report resulted in an impressive satisfaction result compared to similar telcos:

83% come to the community to search for information
59% found the information they are looking for on the Community
33% would call support, 14% would go to the store & 13% would post on Community their question if they can’t find an answer
53% would recommend Community to friends

du Community stands at the top when benchmarked with communities of top 4 global communication service providers (CSP) for on customer satisfaction.

Source of top 4 CSP: Lithium December 2015

Lithys 2016: du - Excellence in Customer Satisfaction