Orange
Interactive
Not just ‘good’ service, but ‘Orange’ service
Orange is one of the largest telecommunications brands on the planet. Owned by France Telecom, it serves tens of millions of customers in over 25 markets.
We’ve been working with Orange to develop a distinctive service culture for their European markets and beyond, as part of their ‘Conquests 2015’ Group transformation program; a simple set of principles that guide real action, to strengthen customer relationships, making every interaction more memorable.
Challenges
As is true for all service businesses, people can make all the difference in driving customer loyalty and love. The Orange brand has a strong sense of identity and values, but customer-facing staff – whether they are customer support agents, retail store advisors or service engineers – often struggle to understand how to live the brand on a daily basis. How do they make each moment of interaction feel Orange? And how do they align doing the right thing for the customer with doing the right thing for the financial growth of the company?
Actions
Making a service culture real means bringing together stakeholders from across different silos – brand, customer service, operations, HR and more. Orange recognized this and we supported them in structuring a multi-disciplinary project team to deliver the ideas and the practice.
We started by getting to grips with the reality of customer relationships and service at Orange today. We analyzed existing customer insight and visited multiple markets, speaking with management and frontline staff about their experiences. We posed challenging, real-life scenarios to understand how employees interact with customers when faced with difficult choices and we got a great feel for what it’s like to be a customer of Orange.
Using the findings, we ran workshops with stakeholders to help them define what the Orange approach to service should be. We looked to other world-class service organizations for inspiration and applied the insights. We made the distinction between what is simply ‘good’ and what is ‘Orange’ – the actions, behaviors and style that make the experience unique and special versus competitors.
We then used the principles to drive actions that bring the service experience to life, as well as helping Orange understand the operational parts of their business that needed to change in order to support the transition – levers such as performance and reward, KPIs, management cascade, and employee competencies in hiring and people development.
To explain the service philosophy to employees we created training toolkits, a short animation to entertain and inspire, and a communications style to give the program internal prominence.
Results
We have helped Orange take the brand beyond communications and into the experience delivered to customers.
The service philosophy is being used by European markets and beyond to shape the customer experience and is playing a vital role in the re-branding of TP in Poland to Orange.
In addition we have gone on to help the HR community at Orange understand how they create an internal culture that supports the external service promise to customers.
Lippincott has also worked with Orange in several other areas related to branded customer experience, including the experience re-design for the broadband proposition in Spain.