WEBVTT

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The customer service function in Germany is big,

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Deutsche Telekom's the incumbent, Germany's a big market

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and the market positioning of Telekom in Germany

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was very much focused on best network,

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and you could see that that would not fly for the future.

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We needed more in order to really give something

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to the premium brand

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and the decision was taken that best customer experience,

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best service would be one of these proofs.

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My name is Gero Niemeyer,

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I led the agile transformation

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of the service operations in Germany.

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When we started off, the talk on the floor was,

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if we can only get rid of handling time targets,

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have more time to serve our customers

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that's the one thing that's holding us back

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from excellent service.

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So in our experimentation site, we did exactly that.

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We said, "So, no handling time targets,

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not for you, not for the team leads.

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Just take your time,

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it's all about customer satisfaction, about solving."

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Well, that didn't work,

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because just having more time, didn't create ideas,

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didn't change the way we served the customers

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and actually customers do not want

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to spend more time on the phone.

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We then started for example

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to do daily stand-ups at the end of the day,

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half an hour, each team talking about,

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"What can we do better?"

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"What will we try tomorrow?"

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"What did we learn?"

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And thereby iteratively getting better in an agile way.

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We introduced a customer feedback cycle

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for every single contact, with calls,

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with callbacks systems, where from an SMS,

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where you can do a star rating of the interaction.

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We introduced last agent callbacks

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so you can talk to this person you spoke to last.

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In the end, it's still service.

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It's still two human beings,

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being in contact with each other, one being the expert,

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the other one having a question and a problem,

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and hopefully the expert can help him resolve it.

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But the way we think about it,

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the way the agent thinks about it,

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really radically changed over time.

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Now, they are in charge.

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In the end the most important thing

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is solving the customer issue.

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And if they need tools, rule changes,

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systems to make that happen,

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they have a system to ask for that.

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It's still an organised way, but in the end,

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the rest of the organisation is working

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for the agents to empower them.

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When we found something that really worked,

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and the procedures that will be implemented,

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and then we started really rolling out

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and doing waves of cities, of sites,

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changing the way of working.

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We're not totally done yet,

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the mobile service in Germany has totally changed,

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but just for internal sites.

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So now we are in the phase of implementing it

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and outsourcing providers.

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And by now, we see significant cost reductions

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on the amount of 10% year over year.

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Now second year, due to the change in service.

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Now for the third year, consecutively

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we have won the top customer service award for hotline,

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for customer service, with Deutsche Telekom Germany,

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coming from a positioning where we were,

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like on every cocktail party,

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someone knew someone

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with a bad story about Deutsche Telekom.

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They still know the stories,

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but now they end the story with,

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"And that has really changed."

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We are really proud about that.