Astellia research identifies customer satisfaction misconceptions

New research commissioned by French network intelligence outfit Astellia has identified a gulf between what mobile customers expect in terms of customer care and what operators think they can get away with.

The signature data point taken from the survey of 2,000 mobile customers and 40 MNOs across EMEA was that around half of mobile customers are dissatisfied with their customer care. To be precise, 48.5% of people surveyed believe they have had a less-than satisfactory engagement with their mobile operator over customer service issues.

Astellia reckons one of the main reasons for this is a major discrepancy between what customers expect and what operators deliver. The survey found the majority operators believe customers will wait a whole day for network problems (of all levels of severity) and a quarter even reckon they’ll put up with a three day wait.

Consumers beg to differ, however, with two thirds of those surveyed saying they expect a network-related problem to be resolved within an hour and only 28% of them prepared to wait a whole day (implying very few would be happy waiting between 2 and 23 hours).

“What is clear from the research is that MNO customer care is not where it needs to be, with high levels of dissatisfaction and obvious discrepancies between what a customer wants and expects, and what an operator can currently deliver,” Astellia CMO Cédric Arnaud-Battandier told Telecoms.com.

“However, it is equally evident that MNOs recognise this fact and are committed to improving customer care, realising it to be key to customer retention in a saturated marketplace where price differentiation is no longer enough.”

Another illuminating finding was the apparent desire for operators to improve their net promoter score (NPS), which is simply the perceived proportion promoters minus the proportion of detractors in the marketplace. Not a single operator reckoned their NPS would be positive, which proved perceptive as the survey revealed a NPS among respondents of -16%, so this is something they understandably want to change and improving their customer service would be a great place to start.