Interview with David Sales

David Sales is a telecom industry consultant and a former director of sales and marketing for BT. We sat down with Sales and asked him to comment on the trends and market forces shaping the industry.

BB2: At last year’s Motivation 2005 event, you talked about how premium support services are playing a key role in BT’s service offerings.

SALES: At BT, we made available to our broadband customers a premium telephone support service using our best technical support agents, who also had good customer handling skills. We initially offered this service for free, and the customers absolutely loved it. We answered 99% of their questions to their satisfaction, and they felt the service was positioned just right. After a few months, we offered customers the opportunity to continue with the service on a paid basis. Forty percent said without any hesitation that they would quite happily pay for the service on the basis of the experience they’d had with it. That experience taught us that customers will invest in ensuring a superior experience.

BB2: Do you think more providers will start offering these types of services?

SALES: Yes, and I would even go so far as to say that a premium support service is potentially the single most important competitive advantage a telco provider could offer to customers in a fast-changing broadband world. That’s because the actual provisioning of the circuits and access to the Internet will increasingly become commoditized, and the range of services and applications that are available over broadband will become commoditized and very, very broad, as will the number of devices that are connected. But there is one thing that brings all of that together for customers in a very complex world, and that is support. There are very few organizations that have the scale, the technical capability or the cultural approach to doing business that would allow them to deliver premium support well. But telcos come from a service background. They have the technical ability. And at BT, we saw this as an absolutely key part of our portfolio in the broadband battle.

BB2: How can providers make their broadband offerings easier to roll out and support?

SALES: We’re moving rapidly from a single PC on a broadband connection to multiple devices networked within the home, and the customer is going to need visibility of that network in a very simple way. But much more importantly than that, providers need to be able to see that setup remotely, and have a conversation with the customer about what’s going in their home, so that they can quickly get them back up and running when a problem arises.

Simplifying the customer experience is critical. I think the challenge going forward is to continue delivering that simplified experience in an even more complex world with more devices, more applications, and less technically capable customers. We have to take simplicity to a much, much greater extreme than even we’ve contemplated, so that what’s quite often an industry compulsion to show how clever we are technically is completely hidden from customers. We need to get to the point where we don’t even ask them whether they want us to sort their problems out, because we happen to know about them before they do. We just get on with it and do it.

BB2: You have said that it’s okay to use offshore resources for support, but that it doesn’t work when hidden cultural understanding is required to answer a particular question. Can you explain what you mean by that?

SALES: I think you have to be very selective about the kind of work that you put out to offshore organizations, and you have to be very selective about the level and ability of the people that you employ in your offshore organizations. You have to evaluate them not just for their technical ability, which is often readily available in developing countries such as India, but more importantly, for their language skills and cultural understanding. That can be taught to some extent, but you do have to make sure that you’re working with an organization that understands the importance of those issues, and is willing to try and make that part of the staff training. And there are some situations where, because the user is under such stress when he or she is talking to you, the conversation needs to sort of transcend to a higher level. It’s actually quite difficult if you’re not in the same country, living the same kind of politics and issues day to day, to have a conversation that is emotionally effective as well as technically effective for the customer. It’s a challenge.

BB2: Switching gears to the phrase everyone is talking about, the Digital Home. Do you believe providers have what it takes to make this a reality?

SALES: My vision of the Digital Home is one where the customer experience is not about managing the technology. All the customer should be interested in is what the next application is that they want to use, whether that’s music, video, or access to the Internet on whatever device they want to use. When you say “digital home,” the very name implies technology. I think we have to try and avoid that. We have to make it easy for customers, when they buy devices or when they hear about new applications, just to access those devices and those applications on a whim, from wherever they want to in their home or even outside of their home. So the digital home is almost a concept that’s only working if we’re not talking about the digital home, because it’s just happening naturally.

BB2: Are there any other thoughts you’d like to share?

SALES: I think it’s always worth remembering for any of us in the technology industry that not everyone loves technology, and therefore it doesn’t have to come into every conversation. What really matters is the customer experience and making that simple and satisfying.

David Sales is a former director of sales and marketing for BT. He currently resides in Cambridge, UK and serves as a consultant on industry and leadership issues.