Sure's Customer Experience Director Shares Her Top 3 Tips for Providing an Excellent CX

Charlotte Dunsterville also talks about Sure's investment plans for the next 12 months and the CX focus on omni-channel and social media.

Charlotte Dunsterville photo.jpgCharlotte Dunsterville joined Sure as Customer Experience Director in 2013 to head up the customer experience division across both consumer and enterprise operations. She also sits on the Executive Committee and previously spent 11 years at Orange.

In the first part of her interview with CX Network she spoke about her role at Sure, the challenges she has faced and the complexity of customer experience in the telecoms industry. Today she talks about future investments, the importance of omni-channel and social media, and she shares her top 3 tips for CX leaders so they can deliver an excellent customer experience.

CX Network: What areas are you looking into investing in over the next 12 months?

Charlotte Dunsterville (CD): "We have a really busy year ahead. We have just launched 4G, which is bringing a massively improved network experience to our mobile customers. We're also replacing our billing system and improving our online experience for customers.

"All of these things are customer led, and rather than handing over the full implementation to an IT team, the CX department is hugely involved in the preparation stage; we run customer research and workshops to understand how customers will want to interact with us as well as how internal users need to use the new system.

"We're using customer journey mapping to support the design phase because we wanted it to be as simple as possible for both customers and users. So we've been putting a lot of thought into how it works on a day-to-day basis."

CX Network: Omni-channel is one of those big CX buzzwords right now, will that continue to be a focus going forward as well?

CD: "Omni-channel is a key part of our strategy and I work very closely with the commercial team on the different elements of omni-channel within our strategy.

"The first element is really about alignment, so it's making sure that retail, customer support and the website are all aligned so we're providing a consistent experience in each channel, however our customers choose to contact us. It's all around how our people are delivering the experience, how we simplify processes, increase brand awareness and provide training in tone of voice - and it's really around consistency.

"In the second part, which we're planning at the moment, we're going to focus on our online experience. We want to make it more convenient for customers and really simple to use, because we would like our customers to do all the easy stuff online as that will free up the people at Sure to handle the more complex enquiries and really focus on giving a good experience.

"The last part of omni-channel is really about social media; we manage many more customers through social media channels now and see it growing every month. We get very good feedback and customer satisfaction on the way we handle people through social media. A good example of that is that as we have rolled out 4G, we have put all of our updates about service disruption on social media as well as traditional communication channels, so it's very immediate. And we can be much more reactive as well; social media is the most important new channel."

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CX Network: Finally, what 3 pieces of advice would you give your peers, so they can improve their own customer experience strategy?

CD: "The first one is a programme I launched called 'a day in the life'. We get senior managers, new starters and anyone in the company to come along to the department and walk hem through what we make customers do and have that same experience. So they experience how good it is, and they can be more evangelical, or experience the problems and the frustrations and hopefully take some insight and ideas back to their own department to help us help customers.

"The next one is that ownership is key; bring the strategic and operational side together. In terms of structure and having ownership of both that has been really helpful in getting things done quickly.

"And the final one is about staff and to treat your people as you would like them to treat your customers. If people feel happy at work, if they feel respected, engaged and listened to, that comes out in a phone call or how a customer is greeted in store and the whole experience just lifts up."

Many thanks Charlotte for your insightful answers! Are you a senior customer experience leader and are you interested in being interviewed for CX Network or collabroate in another capacity? Please get in touch on