Customer experience of ‘moving house’ — still neglected by telecoms
You may have come across use cases for a multitude of customer scenarios. However, there is one use case that is often over-looked: “I move”.
The UK has the highest rate of internal migration in the EU countries, with an average of 3.5% of its population moving house each year. Additionally, the average Briton will move five times during their lifetime (quite a lot more if you live in London and rent).
Moving house can be an exciting and momentous occasion — buying your first house, a bigger house, moving in with your partner, etc. It can also be one of the most excruciating experiences.
In a poll in 2016, two-thirds of people voted moving house as the number one source of stress; triggering more anxiety than relationship breakdowns, divorces and starting a new job. According to Anxiety UK, “the lack of order, the uncertainty and upheaval that surround a move can trigger underlying mental health conditions, such as anxiety, OCD and depression.” Research from energy company E.ON found that, the stress of a house move will last for more than three months.
It’s not difficult to understand why: switching providers, updating contracts and amending details with all our providers are hassles we can do without. The list of people to contact is endless (a non-exhaustive list: postal services, gas, electricity, water, bank(s), car and travel insurance companies, building and contents insurers, pension companies, council, electoral register, driving licence authority, mobile, landline, broadband, cable and health care providers).
One of the top 10 (unexpected) stresses of the process is not having any Internet; unless you are in a great 4G coverage area, the whole moving process is made infinitely more complicated by not being able to go online and access the information you need, when you need it.
Most people who move house will go without broadband for up to 15 days and would consider this to have severely deteriorated their quality of life.
With the increasing drive to conduct more transactions online and so many of our gadgets and devices (IoT) needing an Internet connection the impact is only likely to increase.
It therefore makes sense for service providers to ensure that the “I move” use case is one that they pay particular attention to. If ever there was a “moment of truth” to win the hearts and minds of customers, this would be it. Quite often, this is when as customers, we see the truth behind the brand promise of our service providers: when they either deliver or fail on their customer service promise.
Essentially, this is when a service provider’s Customer Effort Score may be most impacted, (the measure of how much effort a customer has to put into an interaction). Research by CEB, the creators of the Customer Effort Score, showed that “Service organizations create loyal customers primarily by reducing customer effort — i.e. helping them solve their problems quickly and easily — not by delighting them in service interactions.”
Will your service provider make it easy for you to move? Or will they require you to make multiple calls, hold for long periods of time, speak to a different agent every time and explain your situation over and over again? Unfortunately, most telecommunication providers fall into the latter category.
Recently, I watched a friend of mine go through the process of moving house. She started by calling all her providers two weeks prior to her move. She shared with them her moving date and asked them what she needed to do to prepare. For most utilities and other service providers, it only took that one phone call to make the appropriate arrangements but her broadband provider was the worst to deal with, and she had to contact them multiple times over the course of her move.
Admittedly, it is much harder for broadband and fixed line service providers. Whereas other utilities share infrastructure and are able to switch billing quickly, the same process does not exist for telecommunication providers. Even if the previous occupant of the house was with the same provider, it is still not a seamless transfer due to the bureaucracy that has built up around the whole transfer process.
However, consumers are not aware of the challenges faced by telecommunication providers, nor do they care. Providers aren’t just being compared with each other (in fact, customers may never have used a competitor), they are being compared to all other service providers. So at the end of the process, even if the customer remains with the provider, it may be begrudgingly; mentally they may have already churned.
So, what can an operator do? The first step is to treat “I move” as a separate use case that requires special care, attention and thoughtful handling. We have identified five improvements service providers can make:
- Be more convenient than other service providers. Ideally, customers should only have to contact you once to let them know that they are moving. Reduce the number of steps that the customer has to take.
- Create stickiness by providing customers with offers encouraging them to either stick with you through the house moving process or to buy alternative products relevant to their new home (cross selling).
- Train advisers to respond specifically to the needs of customers moving house. This would include making advisers better equipped to deal with stressed customers as well as reminding them that they are being compared to all providers, and not only to other broadband and fixed line providers.
- Create a dedicated team to handle moves in order to reduce customer churn and exploit new opportunities e.g. create leads from new “prospect” tenants moving into former customers’ properties.
- If you screw-up: apologise and then own the resolution of the issue, keeping the customer updated throughout.
As a service provider, your primary focus should be to reduce the overall customer effort and make the switch feel like a seamless process. Hold your customer’s hand and take their pain away (even if behind the scenes the process remains the same).
