Telefónica. Emotional Segmentation for Going Beyond Satisfaction Indicators

The keys

- Going beyond numbers, giving visibility to the consumer/person and his/her emotional element with the relationship between brand and service.

- Making internal teams aware of the relevance of the customer experience at all touch points.

- The lifelong history with the brand and the relationship with the category as a construct of satisfaction and experience.

Satisfaction studies require considerable effort (strong sample sizes, several yearly phases/continuity, internal scaling…), but providing value is somewhat limited by its not serving as a tool used for making organizations more dynamic. Moreover, in an industry as dynamic as that of telecommunications, it’s a clear symptom of the need to re-think the approach; the fact that these indicators tend not to vary that much.

The Quality area at Telefónica España channels the arrival of various customer satisfaction experiences with the company to both management, as well as to different territorial units within the national market.

Over the years, the task has aimed at making an impact, by both extracting customer indicators as well as by being relevant to the business. And in this area, The Cocktail Analysis has served along side in various challenges that have allowed “to humanize” the view of this indicator and understand the customer to a greater extent.

The starting point entailed working with both individual clients as well as with SME’s , in order to analyze the perception and understanding of every dimension of the satisfaction indicator (overall satisfaction, expectations of the company, mental image…). The output led to the identification of levers that have a greater influence on customer satisfaction.

Subsequently, we segmented individual customers by emotions, allowing the Quality team to augment attitudinal variables of the satisfaction indicators in order to define actionable initiatives involving customer complexities. We identified profiles that were condensed into 5 variables, and we assigned an emotional segment to each customer.

Thus, the satisfaction survey was redesigned in order to incorporate dimensions tied to the customer’s history and to her/his emotional track record with the company.

All of these studies entail an ethnographic approach, which includes an in-depth look into the “customer’s reality,” allowing us to obtain very powerful testimonial videos to go along with the data compiled in the satisfaction surveys. This results in getting the organization to empathize with its customers and more easily incorporate a people- centric philosophy.