Renowned telecoms brand Orange works with Capgemini Consulting to create a fresh focus on delivering the customer experience
Renowned telecoms brand Orange works with Capgemini Consulting to create a fresh focus on delivering the customer experience
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In the highly competitive telecoms sector, mobile operator Orange recognises that the ‘customer experience’ differentiator that has always been at the heart of its operating model must be constantly reviewed and re-affirmed as customers become increasingly demanding. As such, the company has been working with Capgemini Consulting on a Europe-wide rolling programme to get each country to become even more customer centric than ever.
The programme began in the UK, followed by Belgium and Switzerland with a series of 12-week in-country projects designed to affect the cultural and procedural changes required to keep Orange on top of the customer experience game. There are plans to roll out similar projects in other key European markets.
Each 12-week project follows a prescribed methodology, although content is adapted to specific in-country market conditions and consumer patterns. Orange is determined that whatever knowledge is transferred and whatever behavioural and process changes take place within each country’s customer experience programme, the lessons learned and new ways of working will be maintained long after Capgemini has left – sustainability is essential.
The project teams comprise both Capgemini customer experience specialists and representatives from the Orange Group, as well as from the country in which the project is being rolled out. The key elements of each project are:
- Customer research (an outside-in approach) focuses on areas that are deemed in most need of improvement based on the creation of a customer journey in each country. The customer journey looks at every single customer touchpoint with Orange in that country and sets out to use a customer perspective to identify opportunities and to benchmark the marketplace.
- In-depth appraisal of ways of working and delivering the customer experience. This involves interviews with the management team; focus groups with call centre agents and in-store staff, as well as customer focus group sessions. Members of the Capgemini team sit in on customer calls to get a real feel for how each country handles its customer interaction.
- The outcome will define the variations seen in each country’s renewed focus on what they do best in customer experience.
- Changing what and how employees provide the ultimate customer experience is the central tenet of each project. By identifying those tasks or projects that are adding little or no value to the customer experience (i.e. irrelevant or costly projects or ways of working), it is possible to stop them and focus on areas that create more value to the customer – and to the business.
- Making the customer feel special has a mirror objective – the employee too must feel special in order to want to deliver a great customer experience. This is another aspect of the Orange customer experience programme. Workshops involving employees have looked at what it would take to make them feel like VIPs.
- Managing change: the changes recommended by Capgemini have the support of senior management but each country takes responsibility for implementing and sustaining that change. Capgemini provides the tools and knowledge required to change behaviours and processes and works to instil a superior understanding of what those changes will mean to the business, its customers, and its employees.
Orange clearly sees the benefit of a consistent approach to customer service delivery across Europe. The company now has a clear market position for its brand and levels of customer experience have been improved with employees knowing what they need to do to deliver excellence in this area – this has been helped by Capgemini’s approach to promoting employee engagement by really respecting them as the key to successful customer interaction.
Orange has also taken out costs by identifying and stopping projects that were adding little or no value to its Customer Experience delivery model so that the business can focus attentions elsewhere.
The legacy of improvement that the combined Capgemini and Orange project teams leave behind after each project is a significant result. Internal teams now have the knowledge and, importantly, the confidence to continue prioritising the ‘good’ and stopping the ‘bad’. In today’s telecoms industry employees are seen as a vital part in the interface between the company and its customers – indeed many of them are Orange customers themselves. By making the employee experience as important as the customer experience, Orange and Capgemini Consulting have taken a big step forward in actively engaging employees with the Orange brand and customer vision.
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