No matter how our customers choose to connect with us – on the phone, in one of our stores, and, increasingly, via the Internet and through social media – their personal engagement with our people, our partners, our products and services is critical to defining their relationship with TELUS. The sum of those interactions and experiences – not just the first time, or the last time, but every time – becomes our customers’ TELUS story.
We believe that a symbiotic relationship exists between our clients, team members, communities and business. In order to ensure sustainable growth for TELUS, we must create value for our customers who will reward us with loyalty and revenue for services over time.
External research shows that industries that are easy and enjoyable to do business with drive a superior customer experience. However, telecommunications, as an industry, consistently ranks low in customer satisfaction and experience studies in North America. For TELUS, this means we have an opportunity to make customer experience a competitive advantage.
At TELUS, we believe we can improve the customer experience we deliver, increase customer satisfaction and increase loyalty and revenue for services over time, by consistently providing:
We quantify loyalty through transactional surveys that measure the likelihood of our customers to recommend our products and services to others and benchmark our quarterly results against our Canadian peers. This ‘Likelihood to Recommend’ model – supported by the four pillars of products and services, contact and experience, reputation and competitive pricing and transparency – serves as the basis of our corporate strategy to put Customers First.
Building a sustainable legacy of customer experience excellence is critical to our success. That is why, in 2010, we increasingly encouraged team members to become advocates on behalf of our customers and we established a corporate priority for 2011: to deliver on our brand promise – the future is friendly®. By providing a consistent and quality customer experience across the markets we serve, we believe we can create a lasting competitive advantage for TELUS.
In 2009, a time when many companies were reducing capital expenditures, our decision to pursue wireless and wireline broadband investments and introduce innovative new services set the stage for improved operating performance in 2010. These strategic investments strengthened our competitive position and helped attract new customers. Customer connections increased by 378,000 or three per cent year over year, fuelled by tremendous growth in smartphone loading and an 85 per cent increase in our TV customer base.
Having innovative new services to market and more customers to serve presented an opportunity to assess our customer experience. Just as we track our financial performance and team member engagement, we measure customer experience through transactional surveys, feedback forums and focus groups. We also use external benchmarking such as the National Wireless Satisfaction Survey and the Corporate Reputation Tracker to monitor our progress against our competitors with respect to customer satisfaction and loyalty. In 2010, we expanded our approach to not only consider satisfaction rates, but further explore factors leading to customer dissatisfaction. We believe our ability to identify what is driving ‘fair’ and ‘poor’ ratings will better allow us to devote resources to resolve issues that cause the greatest rate of dissatisfaction for our customers.
The success of Optik TV™ and increased adoption of complex technologies like smartphones at times outpaced our capacity to provide an efficient customer experience on first contact. We aim to improve our wait times, the number of calls per customer each year, and our churn rates through continued technology improvement, process improvement, and customer service initiatives. We are measuring our results, monitoring our progress and listening to our customers as we strive to be an adaptive, flexible organization focused on meeting our customer experience goals.
Consumers and small business customers who were unable to resolve their issues relating to local, long distance, wireless and internet based products and services through established TELUS channels or escalation processes may submit their complaint to the independent Commissioner of Complaints for Telecommunications Services (CCTS). The CCTS reporting period is from August to July and thus spans two of TELUS’ calendar-year fiscal periods.
In the 2009-2010 reporting cycle, the CCTS saw a 16 per cent increase in the number of complaints received, which we believe is attributable to two main developments. First, the CCTS launched a new website and improved its online complaint form, making it easier for consumers to file complaints. Second, the CCTS was in the media spotlight in late 2010 as the CRTC held a public proceeding to review the effectiveness of the organization. In addition, the CCTS and participating telecommunications service providers have continued to raise awareness of the organization as an alternative dispute resolution option for consumers through the provision of information on websites and on billing statements. Consumer information about CCTS is found in our published directories, on our websites and twice annually on TELUS billing statements. The billing statement messages will increase to four times a year in 2011 for all participating telecommunications service providers.
We continue to monitor the status of complaints initiated through our claims resolution process, and those filed with the CRTC and the CCTS. We also initiated a new Office of the CEO escalations review process to identify and resolve systemic issues as evidenced from weekly customer escalation reports.
One of our goals for 2011 is to reduce the number of complaints received by the CRTC and CCTS by two per cent over 2010. Although we will be challenged to meet this goal because of the increased awareness of the CCTS, we are undertaking a number of initiatives that we believe can improve our customer complaint resolution process and eliminate many of the root causes that are driving the complaints.
|
Target |
2010 |
2009 |
2008 |
||
|
CRTC and CCTS complaints |
2,000 |
2,040 |
1,525 |
2,535 |
In 2010, we achieved a resolution rate of 72 per cent in the number of complaints resolved prior to investigation by the CCTS. As a result of our continuous improvement initiatives, another 2011 goal is to achieve a resolution rate of 75 per cent.
Likelihood to Recommend (LTR) scores will include objectives with respect to products and services, competitive pricing and transparency, reputation, as well as contact experience. The source of the data is various client surveys, conducted several times throughout the year. These surveys focus on several dimensions of customer service with respect to our entire product set across all customer segments. In 2011, we will establish a baseline that we will publish in 2012 and from which we will set improvement goals.
Additionally, in 2011, we will put additional focus on the service we provide during critical customer interactions, such as on-boarding, request for assistance, repair, and TELUS-to-TELUS moves.
Although both incumbent providers and new entrants in the wireless market increased their marketing activities in 2010 compared to 2009, our blended churn rate decreased slightly to 1.57 per cent from 1.58 per cent. We attribute this to:
For 2011, our blended churn target is 1.66 per cent. This reflects the increased and maturing competition in the marketplace and the availability of new devices such as tablets.
The TELUS team focused on establishing a strong cultural foundation in 2010 to help ensure our team members put the customer at the heart of what they do. In 2011, our opportunity is to elevate our performance with respect to the customer experience and the metrics that support it. Several initiatives under the banner of, Customer First, included:
In an effort to consistently enable the provision of a quality customer experience, we introduced a number of innovative initiatives.
On June 10, 2010, more than 350 senior leaders across TELUS spent time with our frontline team members to see and hear what they experience – firsthand. Then, they were asked to identify an opportunity to improve the customer experience that they would advocate at leadership forums across Canada. Ninety-two opportunities for improvement were identified and consolidated in this process, with more than one third being implemented in 2010. Initiatives identified, such as an improved interactive voice system and more flexible installation times, are leading to measurable improvements for TELUS’ customers.
Other initiatives in our efforts to put Customers First that we completed in 2010 include:
Remaining improvements identified through this program are in progress. To maintain momentum and identify synergies across the business, we have created a dedicated Customers First program team responsible for tracking and maintaining momentum on all recommendations that may lead to process, policy, system or training improvements and strengthen customer satisfaction.
Building on the success of this program, we have also introduced an ongoing frontline ‘job shadowing’ experience called Closer to the Customer for leaders and non-customer facing team members across TELUS. Team members involved in the program spend a ‘day in the life’ of a frontline colleague in a call centre, a corporate store or dealer, or in our customers’ homes and businesses. Participants gain awareness of the challenges our customers and team members face and help us identify opportunities to improve the customer experience by drawing a line of sight from their role and decision-making process to the customer.
The event is scheduled for a minimum of three weeks a year to provide a variety of frontline experiences for participants. In 2011, Closer to the Customer initiatives are scheduled to run during the first three quarters of the year and will include more than 2,700 team members across TELUS, including all new hires.
A product of the frontline experiential intervention was the launch in 2010 of a number of new initiatives aimed at improving our customers’ journey through our processes and touchpoints. Additionally, we enhanced existing internal programs and available customer training in an effort to continuously improve the customer experience.
For our business customers, we launched a transformational program that aims to create a best-in-class, end-to-end customer fulfillment process. By improving the effectiveness of our processes and significantly enhancing our internal delivery capacity, our team should be better positioned to deliver services as promised to our customers. This initiative was designed to simplify order processing, reduce the cycle time from proposal to activation to billing, and ensure that quality and customer support accountability are at the forefront throughout the solution fulfillment process.
The results in 2010 were:
At TELUS, we continue to innovate by offering various ways for our customers to connect with us, when and how they want.
We launched Caya™ (Come as you are), a new retail store concept with two locations in downtown Vancouver. The first-of-its-kind retail brand from a major North American communications company welcomes everyone while being tailored to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer/questioning community. Caya offers communications and entertainment technologies for trendsetting people of every orientation. The stores feature TELUS and Koodo wireless handsets, Optik TV, and advanced photo and printing technology from Black’s Photography along with stylish accessories, some exclusive to Caya stores. Caya is also about having the courage to innovate, by taking a risk and doing something differently by exploring new markets and opportunities.|
Account |
Twitter Engagements1 |
Facebook Engagements2 |
Total |
|
|
@TELUS |
644 |
136 |
780 |
|
|
@TELUSfr3 |
275 |
110 |
385 |
|
|
@TELUSsupport |
8,254 |
N/A |
8,254 |
|
|
Total |
9,173 |
246 |
9,419 |
1For Twitter, an engagement consists of each time we post a message or tweet a client directly.
2For Facebook, an engagement consists of each time we post messaging (does not include direct messages in response to individual clients) to our Facebook Fan page.
3fr indicates service in French.
When our customers choose to reach us by phone, they may be connecting with a growing number of agents who are working from home as TELUS continues to evolve our work-from-home solutions. Through our At Home Agent program, approximately 1,000 of our more than 6,500 call centre team members across Canada work from the comfort of their own homes. In addition to reducing travel costs and impact on the environment, this innovative program has decreased team member absenteeism and attrition and increased engagement and productivity. Our Work Styles program is also available to management professional team members.
To enhance the customer experience, we expanded our Learning Centre program, which provides customers access to in-store and online tutorials that help them get the most out of their smartphones. It is available to both new and existing TELUS smartphone clients.
Customers can choose a 45-minute customized one-to-one learning session, or participate in a group session that is focused on a specific smartphone or operating system. Session tutorials address topics such as: top call drivers, applications, organization, messaging, multimedia, social media, device customization, maintenance and troubleshooting.
Our values continue to guide our actions and decisions and remain as relevant today as they were when we created them a decade ago.
TELUS Health Space® enables Canadians to create, store and manage their personal and family’s health records and securely share them with their care providers.
In 2010, TELUS International Philippines (TIP) launched TELUS International University (TIU) to provide continuing education opportunities for TIP team members. By participating in TIU, qualified team members can save up to 50 per cent on the cost of their tuition and benefit from the use of a library within the workplace.
The 2010 Olympic Winter Games provided our team an important opportunity to demonstrate our Work Styles program in action by embracing telecommuting and taking 1,000 vehicles off the streets of Vancouver.
Rachel used to think she couldn’t run. That changed in 1999 when the program manager in Human Resources had a light bulb moment. She decided, once and for all, to become a runner as well as shed some unwanted pounds.
In 2010, TELUS’ Green Teams hosted approximately 65 events and special projects, including workshops on energy and organic gardening, screenings of various documentaries presentations on topics, such as the recycling of electronics at TELUS.
In 2011, TELUS introduced a new program called Closer to the Customer to help deliver on our future friendly brand promise to clients.
In June 2010, TELUS team members hosted more than 100 clients, reporters, community partners and elected officials at TELUS House Toronto − our new home in downtown Toronto.
TELUS team members have access to a program called Bravo that enables them to recognize the achievements of their colleagues across TELUS every day, and career milestones to mark long service with our company.
In 2010, the TELUS team worked with Port Metro Vancouver over eight months to remove two obsolete telecommunication copper cables from the Burrard Inlet near Port Moody, British Columbia.