What’s My Digital Score, What Can I Do About It…and What’s It Worth?

This is a question many mobile service providers are starting to consider as they shift gears and move their digital strategies into execution mode. Everyone talks a good game in relation to their digital endeavours, but what really counts is what customers think and more importantly what they tell their friends.

Wouldn’t it be handy if there was a way to rank these endeavours that gave everyone a starting assessment of where they’re at, and where they need to concentrate? And, how do you accelerate digital services and fix the gap between today’s capability and what is needed to succeed and drive up NPS?

This was the topic of a digital workshop MATRIXX conducted recently with a western European service provider. We gathered a good mix of business (digital strategy, product management and consumer marketing) and technical (IT strategy, enterprise architecture and BSS/billing managers) stakeholders for sessions over two days. We kicked off the session by asking all participants to self-score their current digital offering on a simple 0 to 10 index across a six key areas and then worked out an average.

This digital benchmarking exercise was very insightful. There was some score inflation (using the visual digital index you see here), and lots of variation of views between the business and technical stakeholders, but the average was a consistent and honest appraisal. You can see that in every category, this CSP scored itself less than halfway there across a spectrum of issues from how customers are segmented to provide a personalized service, right through to how payments are handled and what the resultant customer experience was.

This particular CSP acknowledged it has a lot of work to do before it becomes a true digital service provider (DSP), and this exercise helped move stakeholders to an internal consensus view from ‘let’s leave everything the way it is’ to a real sense of urgency around getting this right for the future.

So, looking at the index above, how would you rate your progress to becoming a DSP, bearing in mind that whatever work is undertaken must impact the customer experience in a big way.

That’s because customers have become more demanding and they are increasingly looking for seamless, Uber-like experiences for all their digital needs. They’re especially keen on an exciting, compelling experience direct from the device…but CSPs have left themselves plenty of room to improve. CSPs are clocking an average net promoter score (NPS) of just +5 versus pure digital players (like Netflix, Uber and Amazon) with scores in excess of +50 NPS.

According to analysts, providing a great customer experience not only fuels loyalty, as one would expect, but it also grows revenue; because there’s a greater trust factor between CSP and their customers, users tend to spend more money on services over time.

According to WDS, a Xerox, Temkin Group and Capgemini company, great (or poor) customer experience can translate into both positive and negative revenue. WDS points out that low NPS scores (like only +5) tend to result in about -7% revenue, while high scores (like +50) create a 33% boost in revenue. And that’s a figure worth ‘transforming’ for.