Interview with Sylvain Thevenot, TalkTalk's senior director of products and strategy

Thursday 10 December 2009   |  8 Comments  |  

Broadband Genie editor Chris Marling sits down with Sylvain Thevenot (pictured), TalkTalk's senior director of products and strategy, to talk about foreign call centres, other key consumer complaints, the future for Tiscali customers, TalkTalk Pro, the Tesco threat and the future.

Broadband Genie: We get a large number of complaints about TalkTalk’s customer services and tech support. Are there any plans to improve the service, or bring it back to the UK?

Sylvain Thevenot: "Since November 2008 we have run a major ‘Customer Experience’ programme. As part of it we went back to basics, with the TalkTalk execs taking a leading role: we each had three 'buddies' (customers) assigned to us – so if they had any problems they would call me and my peers in the management team. This forced the whole organisation to go back to basics and understand what really happens in day-to-day customer life. The question about the accent of ‘customer service agents’ was a key area, but when we looked deeply into this, it was actually mainly the telephone infrastructure between our call centres that we needed to improve.

"We have had problems with the lines going to our overseas call centres – quite unfortunate for a telephone company! We are now going to change all of those lines, starting just after Christmas, putting in our own pipes all the way to the call centres. We're also putting a new telephone infrastructure in place that will allow us to distribute calls more cleverly between the different sites, especially at peak times – which will reduce significantly any waiting time.

"Charles [Dunstone, Carphone Warehouse CEO] was very aware of the problems and keen to sort them out. The call centre telephony structure was a real problem, with lines cricking and dropping, which was more of an issue than any problems with accent.
We realised the same centres servicing two of our competitors in the UK market (Sky and Vodafone) were not getting the same level of problems we were: it was something specific to us. We spent a lot of time analysing it – we still have people in Bangalore on site to keep monitoring the situation. Lines were dropping, it was pretty bad, but now we are dealing with it, and the quality has significantly improved.
Another thing we looked at was the scope of broadband support. We revised a lot – I even had a couple of my guys from the product area, real technical experts, who went to our call centres for four months and really redesigned the scope of our broadband support.

"We had two-tiered broadband support. To get the right level of support, you had to go through Broadband 1 to get to Broadband 2. Broadband 1 dealt with the very basic things: is the light still flashing on the router, have you tried switching the router off etc. We've changed that completely because there was not necessarily good logic. Not only was it not good for customers, but also we had to take two calls and the handover was not always smooth because they were not always in the same location. We have now redefined, by location, the scope of the support – it now flows much better, following an easier connection path depending on the severity of the issue: you can go fairly quickly down the path.

"People may not have experienced it yet, as it has only started to be implemented from October – it will take a while before we really see the benefits. We've initially rolled out the improvements to half our sites – the rest of our staff are currently being trained."

So there is no chance of moving your call centres back to the UK?

"There is clearly a cost benefit for us as a company not to, but there is more to it than that. We have changed our thinking since we started this programme. Initially after seeing the complaints around offshore call centres, the idea was to bring everything back to the UK. But when we started to look in depth, using control groups of on and offshore sites, we found the issues weren't so much in the locations themselves, but more with the training: if we had the scripts, the guys in India were pretty good – probably technologically more savvy.

"So, what we've done is optimise the sites. Typically the front line is in the UK, parts of the customer service and billing are in the UK and South Africa, but none of the initial customer service and billing queries are taken in the Indian call centres: we only have the broadband support there, as it requires more technical knowledge. We haven't just taken a cost conscious view; we've optimised to where we think the best skill sets are.

"However, if this doesn't work, I don't think we will have a problem moving it back to the UK. We also have some broadband support in the UK, as well as advanced tech support."

We are still seeing some complaints from customers being oversold TalkTalk products, such as confusion over broadband line speeds.

"Yes, we have seen some of this, but generally we are very good. We are now in the good books with Ofcom in terms of compliance with its principles. Previously we had experienced some misselling issues, partly with our field agents who go to door to door, but this is now very much under control."

We have also had some complaints regarding supply issues of new broadband and telephone lines.

"We have had some hardware supply issues recently, but they are just the consequence of a bigger issue that we are dealing with.
Back in April we started to supply new telephone lines for people who had an interrupted BT line, or didn't have a line at all. We decided to offer this in a relatively low-key way, so the system we put in place wasn't designed to deal with particularly large volumes. But volume increased more than we anticipated and we are now in a position to handle this demand.

"When we supply a line, we do not do it in the same way BT retail do. We do this in two blocks: first we activate the line, then we activate it for broadband. This actually elongates the cooling off period, as customers get one week for each part of the process. However, this can create some complications, so we have set up a special customer services team to deal with our ‘new lines’ customers.

"We are implementing a solution that will arrive shortly after Christmas, which will do the normal broadband provision in a week. We're not sure if his will be January or February, but it is happening now. We have two cooling off periods, one for the voice line and one for the broadband, which run one after the other and both services can be cancelled during either, as it is a bundle. It was a volume issue, it has been a huge headache for us over the past few weeks, but it is now under control. However, there will still be some problems before it is completely solved in the New Year when the large-scale new solution is in place."

Do you have any positive news for your new Tiscali customers?

"We have started to talk to our Tiscali customers, welcoming them to the TalkTalk Group. We have started to tell them they will become TalkTalk customers in the near future: we only wanted to do this when we had some good news for them. We didn't just want to repaint the brand, but show them some benefit of becoming a TalkTalk customer.

"When we re-brand we will ensure that all TalkTalk customers – regardless of which brand they originally came from – have transparent pricing. Some will get a better service for the same price, as they were outside the Tiscali LLU footprint but we can move them to our unbundled exchanges, which will give them a better service in terms of throughput, which means better speeds. This will happen in Q1 2010."

How has your new service, TalkTalk Pro, gone so far?

"It is going very well. In the first few weeks were ahead of our expectations. It is helping to create a halo effect around the brand, offering a quality all-inclusive product and moving us further from simply being a budget brand to being a ‘quality and value’ brand. We had the quality network, but not necessarily the retail product to go with it, and we now want to leverage the largest LLU network in the UK we have deployed over the past three years. The message is you can save more than £200 versus BT's Option 3, which is very strong."

Is there anything else new in the pipeline?

"Next, we want to do more clever things with our next generation network – all the things BT claimed it wanted to do with 20Mb, but the 20Mb roll-out has been delayed. We have invested a lot of money in this: we now have three million customers on our unbundled network and want to give more convenience to them.

"We will continue to improve our credentials around broadband performance and quality, as well as making improvements in voice convenience and value. Our average speed has increased significantly across the TalkTalk network, so now we have concentrated on the quality of our products, routers etc.

"We also want to continue in other areas to improve the overall Customer experience – one of these is security. We believe we can help our customers have a more secure broadband experience, so we are developing in this space. Our family customers need a simpler, better security service. We have already started to ship a software client for young kids called ‘Magic Desktop’, but this is just our first toe in the water.

"We want to help our customers better manage their broadband experience, along the lines of parental control, letting them control what is happening in their home. More and more devices can access the internet, and it is getting out of control. For example, we want to allow our customers to decide what they want to do about peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P): give them the tools to understand and control what is happening.

"We have made it clear we do not support illegal file sharing but nor do we support the Government's proposals on this, so we want to give our customers more control. We will tell them what P2P is all about, and give them the tool to switch it on or not - they will be able to filter the content that is going through their pipe. For example, half of our customers who were receiving P2P traffic didn't even know it was P2P traffic, partly because their kids were doing it in another room: at least the parents will be able to control that. We also believe their is a lot of Wi-Fi hijacking going on out there, meaning many people could be punished wrongly if the current measures being talked about were made law."

Any comment on Tesco re-entering the fixed-line broadband market?

"Tesco is very interesting. We generally welcome competition, as we are a pretty aggressive company and we are confident about the quality and value of our products. We also think we are in a good position because we have the largest unbundled network: we have a good position, we're not scared, but it’s fair to say we'll be watching closely and will be careful, as Tesco plays very much in the same area, of value.

"Is it going to change the market? Probably not, because it's coming in quite late. But can it make an impact? Yes. And impact our sales? Potentially. But at the same time, we are still taking customers away from Virgin Media, certainly on the value package, and we still take customers from BT, so we think the pool of switchers is still large enough for us to hit our numbers. But we are watching."

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