On the front line of CX: Vera Skogoreva

At Telia Carrier our commitment to customer experience (CX) is second to none and we constantly look at how we can make improvements to how we deliver services and respond to incidents on our network.  Our CEO, Staffan Göjeryd, explains it in an earlier blog, but the heart of making CX a success is our people and the culture we promote among them.  It gives them a sense of ownership, which empowers them to engage with customers, acting to own and solve their problems.

In the next few months, you’ll meet some of our service managers from around the world through this blog, to learn a little about ‘a day in the life’ on the front line of customer support at Telia Carrier.  First out is Vera Skogoreva in our Moscow office.

Vera – tell us a bit about yourself!

“I am one of our team of service managers that look after our customers in more than 125 countries across the world. With 15 years’ experience in the company, I have learnt a lot and have seen a huge amount of change in the telecommunications sector.  Whilst I love getting back to my country home and enjoying my Home & Yard Décor hobbies, being part of Telia Carrier at this hugely exciting time is great, and I cannot wait to see the new developments to come in our sector.”

What does a typical day at work look like?

“So, I start my day by reviewing our incident lists for any network outages, issue escalations and customer requests that have come in.  This may also include items that are being passed on by a colleague as, sometimes, one of us might be better suited to manage a specific request due to greater knowledge and experience of this region.  It can also include requests for service performance investigations and access to the customer portal, credit claims, or other operational issues.  These are then prioritized, and we work through the workday to solve them.

“Some of the requests we deal with can be very simple to resolve – such as helping a customer find where they can reset their customer portal password – or they may require more technical investigation and, on occasion, support from other teams.  At Telia Carrier, we have a very effective collaboration throughout the organization and work closely with the Service Delivery and Customer Operations teams to resolve problems and identify patterns. For example, this may be where certain network conditions might be creating an issue on multiple occasions.”

How do you use data to enhance the customer experience?

“Our main operational system is used by Customer Support, as well as the Sales and Delivery teams, and our NOC, which helps us get the most information to support customer services, including incidents and planned maintenance. Additionally, there are systems like network inventory, network monitoring, and change management planning, that are partly integrated with the operational system. Many of these systems are interfacing with an analytical and reporting tool that helps us analyze data from different sources and supports decision-making.  It means we can get a huge amount of statistical and analytical information at speed to support decision making as well as data on invoicing, traffic, disturbances, service tickets and planned engineering.

“A lot of this information is now also directly available through the customer portal and is a key part of our operational transparency goals.  In fact, we spend a good proportion of our time helping customers get started on using the portal through training sessions, though in truth it is extremely easy and intuitive to use and explore, once they have access.”

What do you like the most about your work?

“One of the most rewarding parts of my job, outside of directly helping customers, is the role we play internally in improving processes at Telia Carrier.  Our global service management team regularly comes together to look at specific points of process from across the business to see how we can enhance the customer experience for everyone.  Engineering, network operations center and second line support are just some of the teams we work with regular to identify opportunities for improvement.

“A recent example was a bug we found in an operational system that meant some customers did not have an ‘elected operational contact’ – the person designated to be made aware of planned engineering works and network disturbances.  This impacted a small set of customers but, through our engagement with them, we quickly identified the root cause which was then resolved.

“In a few words: our job can never be called boring – you really do not know from one day to the next what problems you’ll be facing and how we will be helping customers.”

Learn more about CX at Telia Carrier.