The customer service function in Germany is big,
Deutsche Telekom's the incumbent, Germany's a big market
and the market positioning of Telekom in Germany
was very much focused on best network,
and you could see that that would not fly for the future.
We needed more in order to really give something
to the premium brand
and the decision was taken that best customer experience,
best service would be one of these proofs.
My name is Gero Niemeyer,
I led the agile transformation
of the service operations in Germany.
When we started off, the talk on the floor was,
if we can only get rid of handling time targets,
have more time to serve our customers
that's the one thing that's holding us back
from excellent service.
So in our experimentation site, we did exactly that.
We said, "So, no handling time targets,
not for you, not for the team leads.
Just take your time,
it's all about customer satisfaction, about solving."
Well, that didn't work,
because just having more time, didn't create ideas,
didn't change the way we served the customers
and actually customers do not want
to spend more time on the phone.
We then started for example
to do daily stand-ups at the end of the day,
half an hour, each team talking about,
"What can we do better?"
"What will we try tomorrow?"
"What did we learn?"
And thereby iteratively getting better in an agile way.
We introduced a customer feedback cycle
for every single contact, with calls,
with callbacks systems, where from an SMS,
where you can do a star rating of the interaction.
We introduced last agent callbacks
so you can talk to this person you spoke to last.
In the end, it's still service.
It's still two human beings,
being in contact with each other, one being the expert,
the other one having a question and a problem,
and hopefully the expert can help him resolve it.
But the way we think about it,
the way the agent thinks about it,
really radically changed over time.
Now, they are in charge.
In the end the most important thing
is solving the customer issue.
And if they need tools, rule changes,
systems to make that happen,
they have a system to ask for that.
It's still an organised way, but in the end,
the rest of the organisation is working
for the agents to empower them.
When we found something that really worked,
and the procedures that will be implemented,
and then we started really rolling out
and doing waves of cities, of sites,
changing the way of working.
We're not totally done yet,
the mobile service in Germany has totally changed,
but just for internal sites.
So now we are in the phase of implementing it
and outsourcing providers.
And by now, we see significant cost reductions
on the amount of 10% year over year.
Now second year, due to the change in service.
Now for the third year, consecutively
we have won the top customer service award for hotline,
for customer service, with Deutsche Telekom Germany,
coming from a positioning where we were,
like on every cocktail party,
someone knew someone
with a bad story about Deutsche Telekom.
They still know the stories,
but now they end the story with,
"And that has really changed."
We are really proud about that.