Perceived Quality: The Key to Customer Satisfaction

KPN Is a Mobile Challenger

KPN is an integrated market leader with fully fledged services covering wireless, wireline, broadband, VoIP and TV. KPN's home market is the Netherlands. We have our own networks in Germany and Belgium.

E-Plus Challenger Strategy

Since 2005, the E-Plus Group has positioned itself as a challenger in the German mobile market, and we take a regional approach to marketing. In some cities, we have a market share of 40%, but there are other cities where our market share is small. So we figure out where the opportunities are to regionalize ourselves and how to address market challenges. In certain areas, if there are flat rate tariff plans, the customer base start to increase by itself. You need to overcome a certain threshold. In markets where we haven’t overcome the threshold, we use other mechanisms.

As a result of innovative business models, modern structures and strong partnerships, the E-Plus Group was able to significantly strengthen its market position and show a more dynamic and profitable development than the market. We have outsourced network operations to Alcatel-Lucent, and in the IT domain, we have outsourced operations and even some development work to Atos Origin. 

We closely follow customer demands. We look really closely at where customers are using our network and respond exactly in these areas. We need to be sure that, especially in the regular tariff framework, there is fair competition with market leaders in areas such as frequency and interconnection charges.

We are looking at new market channels. We implemented models such as MVNO, INMVNO that are designed to bring partners to our network. We have at least several big brands within our network. The flat-rate brand BASE and the mobile discounters Simyo and Blau are market leader in their segments, while the original E-Plus brand offers a range of services to its existing customers. The brand AY YILDIZ addresses the Turkish community in Germany. Our M2M brand is used for machine-to-machine business, and it is our first foray into the OTT world. 

We have a lot of brand partners, and we only use their brands to resell our products. There are famous football teams, for example, that have their own brand on our network. One of our prepaid services is sold by one of the biggest retailers in Germany. Our philosophy is to intently follow customer needs and offer very attractive prices. In Germany, our focus is on mobile communications. We try to introduce a wide range of services with very simple tariffs. We are cooperating very closely with ZTE and other handset brands to provide attractive devices to our customers.

Our most popular tariff plan is a flat-rate ten euro per month plan. You get a flat rate for voice calls within the BASE community and a flat rate for SMS to anyone. Users can also select from a portfolio of other flat-rate services. We even have a combination that includes 500 MB highspeed data usage per month to any terminal. We bundle this plan with a terminal to encourage people to use our data services. In the past E-Plus mainly concentrated on voice services, and it is really paying off to have this Internet flat-rate tariff outside the bundle. The flat rates I mentioned earlier can be changed on a monthly basis, so it is a little bit of an IT challenge, but we have managed it. We don’t charge subscribers any connection or network fees, and as we have seen elsewhere, this leads to a tremendous increase in traffic. We already know that flat rates in the voice domain stimulate traffic. We have to be able to cope with a tremendous increase in data traffic.

Perceived Network Quality

In the past, the network operator had nearly everything under its control. That has completely changed. The customer is surrounded by different clouds. Even the perceived network quality can be judged as a cloud. If I have MVNO, even the network can be considered to be in the cloud, and then individual brands come into play. The Turkish community, for example, has completely different demands and feelings, and these come into play in customer support. The operating system of a device itself and the OTTs also need to be considered. To really control the customer experience, we have to go completely outside our own areas of control, and we need automatic mechanism to tell us what users expect.

We do customer interviews to determine what customers expect and their mobile phone usage habits. Voice and SMS still dominate in the German market, followed by data services, which now are creating a dynamic market.

Network app

Together with another small company we have developed a kind of network app where we ask end-users about their experience. We start by asking our own employees about certain mechanisms and how they experience the network. It does not need to be complicated; we use simple pictures like smileys for feedback. The customer can add measurements. We are aware of every point in the network, and what we are basically measuring is signal strength. In this app, we have also taken privacy into account, and the user is not obliged to send their information or measurements to the network operator. However, to encourage users to share this information with us, we have a small ranking function built into the app, so we say “OK, you have sent 100 measurements, you are ranked No. 1 out of all the users.”  At the moment, we are trialing it with our own employees, but we intend to roll it out to interested customers as well. We may even roll it out to certain brands running on our networks.  

Continuous dialog

We try to stay in a continuous dialogue with our customers. We use social networks, but we need to be careful using these as well. You cannot use social networks only during the week and neglect them over the weekend. If you have a serious outage, and you announce it using social media, you have to be careful of the process. If you are not there on Saturday or Sunday and there is an outage, then the fallout will be great, and you have no control anymore. So social media requires 24/7 attention. This is something new we’ve learned already, but we can also use social media for customer care. There are some experts within our customer bases who are keen to support other customers. So we have a blog, for example, in Facebook. Our users help other users cope with challenges that come from their phones or somewhere else. This is a background customer care process.

On a regular basis, we invite some customers to round table discussions to get feedback on what they expect, whether they are confident with the network, and what they are missing. 

Concentration on real needs

We can offer the full range of broadband services, but at the end of the day, we have to look at our customer bases, which are predominately German. These customers buy their phones at the retailer. What are their real demands? We typically don’t win out on speed tests; that’s usually Vodafone and T-mobile in the German market. But we have other questionnaires where customers weigh up what they get in speed and what they have to pay for voice. You do not necessarily need to be the fastest, but the total package you offer has to be above all relevant.        

We concentrate more on smartphones than dongles because business customers are typically not our customer base. Smartphone users might have a completely different set of needs in terms of speed and volume than the dongle users.

Customer experience lab

Last but not least, we decided to cooperate with the Technical University of Chemnitz to build a customer experience lab where we want to trial a small LTE network. We want to determine the experience from an end-user perspective in terms of data compression and video streams. We want to determine levels and what is acceptable from the customer perspective. We have not only technicians involved but also psychologists in these trials.

The evolution of mobile communications is not only taking place within the technical domain. We are moving into 4G, and this entails change within the organizations. We have to become a customer-centered organization and encourage our employees to change their way of thinking. Those activities that are not really about customers can be done by third parties and outsourcing partners. We have to take on board our outsourcing partners, vendors, and OTTs to form an ecosystem that produces services that are smoothly perceived by our customers. 

ZTE Supporting the E-Plus Move into 4G

How is ZTE supporting our move to 4G? Within the KPN Group, E-Plus Germany has a very strong relationship with ZTE. We decided to bring ZTE in the radio access domain. ZTE is deploying HSPA+base stations, and it is a vendor with increasing market share. In 2011, we introduced ZTE to our packet core network. We have PCRF up and running, and we have a fair-use tariff policy outside.

ZTE’s behavior analysis system would potentially allow us to get a better grip on automatic processes. Together with the university, we hope we can use purely technical KPIs to influence real user perceptions. We want technical KPIs to contribute pragmatically to a better network look and feel; we don't want them to be purely technical indicators. ZTE's evolved packet core will be introduced over the course of the year, and ZTE supports us with attractive terminals. The company provides not only smart phones but also tablets. ZTE is also helping us by bringing in devices that we can associate with our BASE brand.