What do customers want and why?

In a joint keynote delivered to a packed theatre at DIGIT’s inaugural ITSX (Service Desk) Summit, Service Strategy Managers at Sky, Cheryl Graham and Sarah Reeder, sought to answer this question through the lens of their company’s fast-moving transformation journey.

Having been around for almost 35 years, the fact that Sky is still such a big player in media and telecommunications is testament to the fact that it’s successfully transformed its offerings and end-user experience multiple times.

However, the current expectations of customers for agency over the services they have – as well maintaining and observing how well these are working, all with a framework that allows any issues to be addressed quickly and effectively – have meant that Sky have had to undergo its most ambitious transformation journey to date.

In their talk, Graham and Reeder, respectively, addressed how Sky envisions using customer journey data to encourage the appropriate uptake of services that certain users would be interested in, as well detailing functionality that’s already been rolled out, as well company initiatives to bridge the digital divide.

Customer Experience

“We are finding that since Covid, everyone is far more aware of time and what they want to do with it.”

So says Graham, as she elucidates on shifting customer expectations, inarguably moving away from a model that had worked for Sky for so long – customer experiences sold and delivered primarily through voice, something the company has historically maintained a good track record in.

However, Covid has shown people that time is of the essence, with users now moving into more transactional services – “we’re finding that shift into short, sharp exchanges,” as Graham says.

She adds: “Across sales and services, people want a frictionless experience.”

This of course lends itself to a digital first journey, which “puts Sky in a bit of a conundrum, as we have a really good customer experience setup, delivered through voice, but we weren’t going to sit around doing nothing.”

Hypothetical Case Studies

To illuminate how Sky is planning to transition from it’s current model to something more in line with the rigours of evolving customer expectation, Graham went on to offer a vision of where she sees Sky being in a few years within this space, introducing fictional customer ‘Gemma’ – a sky subscriber looking to move her mobile phone service to Sky.

Talking about Gemma’s customer journey, Graham says “she picks her phone, her data plan… then abandons the basket. She comes back a few days later, different data plan, this one’s smaller and less expensive, then abandons the basket again.”

It’s at this point when Graham says that would have an enough data to intervene in a compelling and appropriate way.

She adds: “We send her a personalised email, we offer her the big data plan that she originally chose, but for the price of the smaller data plan she looked at the second time around.”

In her second example, Graham introduces grandmother and grandson duo, ‘Doris and James’. In this instance, Doris is tech savvy but doesn’t like dates, specifically, the organisational side in handling the acquisition and payment for services. So, the grandson James takes care of this.

In this case, “we email James and offer full fibre, with and an engineer assigned to install it in two weeks,” says Graham.

A few days before the engineer is due to come, they can check and see when the engineer is coming with a specific time, their name and other details that can reassure them and help lessen the impact of beginning a new service through Sky.

“At the moment, we don’t do this” Graham is quick to stress.

She adds: “We’re looking at these kinds of examples and trying to make them simple for our customers.” Refreshingly tangible goals that seemed to resonate with the DIGIT ITSX audience, with Slido questions pouring in regarding Graham, and subsequently, Reeder’s presentation.

Implementation & Initiatives

In the second part of the talk, Sarah Reeder took to the stage to talk about what Sky has implemented and how the use of telemetry has given agency to Sky customers over their services and created less friction when something does go wrong.

Reeder says: “We want to know, as a provider, how our products are performing – we do this through telemetry.

“This is important because it also means our customers can check the status of their Sky products, and if there’s an issue, there’s no need to make a time-consuming call, it can automatically notify us and we can take care of it.”

This system, delivered through users’ Sky Hubs, allows the company to inform the customer, almost in real-time, with telemetry allowing for updates on service status across Sky’s suite of products and services every 15 minutes.

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In terms of agency, customers can easily access data such as broadband speeds, and if, anecdotally, they feel like the data they’re seeing doesn’t match up to their experience, they can manually request assistance.

Reeder finished her talk by discussing the success of Sky Up, an initiative set up last year in which the company committed to help up-skill those who are “digitally isolated with technology, connectivity, and training.”

Through a £10 million fund, Sky Up will deliver 100 new digital hubs in economically deprived areas, as well as issuing tech grants by way of new devices and stable internet to support learning, as well the expansion of the Sky Up Academy Studios to help young people develop storytelling skills.