TMCnews Featured Article

Sustaining and growing a business, especially during economically challenging times, is no mean feat. When developing strategies to make this happen, many managers think mostly about innovating new products, acquiring assets and expanding geographically. Those things are useful, but it is customer loyalty that ultimately makes a company successful in the long run.

Yet, focusing on customer loyalty is not always the easiest thing to do, since it can be challenging to tie this factor directly to profits. Companies that figure out how to hear, analyze and act on customer feedback—and turn that into actions impacting the bottom line—have a definite leg up on their competition.

One company that successfully achieved this goal is tw telecom, a provider of converged, managed network services including Ethernet networking, VoIP and virtual private networks (VPNs).

In November 2006, tw telecom (News - Alert) acquired 20,000 new customers in 31 metro areas. During the process of thinking about how to effectively serve those new customers, as well as existing clients, the company set a pretty ambitious goal: transform its core strength (customer service) into a differentiator that would have lasting impact on the bottom line.

In a case study, Lara Wise, VP of tw telecom’s customer experience division, explains what the company had in mind when developing its Voice of the Customer program: “We wanted to integrate customer feedback into our day-to-day operations, distribute that feedback to employees so they were empowered to take immediate action, and use the feedback to focus our investments on improvements that would maximize our business performance.”

Turning that vision into reality required partnering with an appropriately robust provider of customer feedback software. After evaluating many options, tw telecom opted to go with Satmetrix’s customer feedback technology and expertise.

Thanks to the solution Satmetrix developed, tw telecom was able to discover game-changing customer feedback, and then successfully incorporate that into daily business operations.

For example, customers reported that relatively simple service changes took too long to complete. In response to this information, tw telecom developed and implemented a new process that reduced standard cycle time for simple voice service changes by up to 80 percent. 

“Service has always been a strength of ours, but now we’ve made it an actual competitive differentiator in the marketplace,” Wise said.

The differentiation has translated into measurable results: revenue growth was five percent year-over-year as of second quarter 2010, customer churn dropped 27 percent from second quarter 2008 to second quarter 2010, and employee productivity is up significantly. 

The full case study mentioned earlier describes in more detail how tw telcom used Satmetrix’s solution to discover and act on customer service insights, turning feedback into revenue while improving employee engagement and productivity.