Is everything that has a screen automatically a touchpoint? It depends!
What exactly defines a touchpoint? A keyboard? A screen? A microphone? Content and dialogs must be based on the capabilities of each touchpoint. For example, it makes no sense to lead text-intensive chats on a device with a remote control. But couldn’t you also continue a dialog on a second screen? Or should everything be solved where it happens?
When people sit down in front of their televisions, they usually do it because they want to chill out. They want to enjoy watching a series, a movie and, yes, sometimes they just want to be distracted. What they usually don’t need is to deal with complex interactions, installations or troubleshooting. In the “olden days”, we didn’t have any of this with the TV set either – we just turned it on, selected one of a limited set of channels, and watched it. Today, however, the range of offers on TV, plus streaming services and video on demand, has grown so drastically that the associated technology has simply become more complex. Statistically, this means that more errors can occur. As a result, customers sometimes have to deal with more issues than they may like. Of course, we are working hard to prevent errors from occurring in the first place. Still, given the highly complex interaction of bandwidth, routers, apps, TV sticks and receivers, they are not entirely preventable. We therefore also have to be prepared to provide quick and targeted help on a screen that is only capable of limited interaction, so as not to ruin movie night at home.
What does that mean for One Conversation?
It's actually quite simple: We just have to put ourselves empathically in the customer’s situation – on their couch, so to speak – and use this to sensibly deduce what we can offer here as the “next best action”. In other words, what is required and, very importantly, to also consider what might be inappropriate at this point. Let’s just assume that a customer wants to watch a movie on MagentaTV after work, but it stutters and stops. We know from market research that customers don’t call the service hotline directly in such cases, but look for a solution themselves: What if we could offer our customers some guidance directly through a simplified dialog on the TV in order to solve the problem? This is what we do with “Frag Magenta” on TV (“Frag Magenta” is our digital service assistant at Deutsche Telekom). Here, the customer can use the TV remote control to “converse” with the digital service assistant and, with just a few clicks, receive a clear suggestion on how to solve the problem. Only if this doesn’t work do we jump to the next level of dialog – which might be a transfer to another screen that has a keypad, for example. So for us at One Conversation, it’s not only about empathically communicating the right thing, but also acting appropriately for the touchpoint.
In terms of customer lifetime value, we also keep in mind that the TV is the largest screen in the home and the heart of the home experience. So it’s also a good place to generate sales, because we know that our customers also reward themselves with a movie night. We can offer streaming subscriptions here, for example – but there’s one thing we have to keep in mind: We’re in our customers’ free time, so we certainly don’t want to bug them there.
One Conversation. A program for an empathic and reliable customer relationship.
One Conversation is Telekom’s new program that will guarantee a consistent and positive customer experience across all thinkable touchpoints. To this end, an AI-based mind is being built up to ensure that our dialog with the customer is a continuous conversation. No matter whether we chat with them, talk to them on the phone, or meet them in the store. We will be as familiar with our customer as a long-time friend and know what they like and even what they don’t like. This is how we cultivate an empathic relationship with our customers and how we always know what the next best action will be.
Stay tuned.
Yours, Jan