Rogers reinvents its customer service philosophy

An iconic Canadian business
Rogers Communications, a leading telecommunications and media company in Canada, provides wireless, residential services, sports, and media to Canadians and Canadian businesses.

Rogers for Business supplies small, medium, large, and public sector organizations with enterprise-grade solutions and technology services to support their connectivity and digital needs. The Rogers wireless network reaches 96% of Canadians from coast to coast.

Unified approach to customer service
Rogers for Business strives to serve its customers to a consistently high standard with empathy, respect, and confidence. “Customers understand that technology is complex,” explains Scott Thomson, Vice President for Technical Customer Service at Rogers for Business. “Understanding what the customer is experiencing and reassuring them that we’re actively resolving the problem is absolutely paramount.”

Rogers for Business has built its winning strategy by ensuring the customer is at the center of every discussion, consideration, and decision. The Technical Customer Service organization has adopted the definition of immediacy—the quality of bringing one into direct and instant involvement with something, giving rise to a sense of urgency or excitement—as inspiration to redefine the role of its people, processes, and tools, and ultimately evolve and unify its approach to customer service.

Rogers for Business Technical Customer Service deployed ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) to transform its entire service assurance organization, using proactive engagement, customer-forward analytics, and ‘in-the-moment’ operations to gain a forensic level of insight into its customers and infrastructure. This solution enables active management and prevention of the vast majority of problems before they occur.

Proactive engagement
ServiceNow has given Rogers for Business the capability to proactively monitor the performance of its services, with incidents auto generated in ServiceNow if quality drops below pre-set thresholds.

This enables technical teams to assess, troubleshoot, and proactively engage with customers from a position of informed confidence.

Now, even minor issues can be identified and resolved at speed, while data analytics, customer health checks, and intuitive dashboards are prompting swift and targeted actions that maintain high service standards. This is a capability that’s especially crucial for essential public health and emergency service providers.

Scott explains: “We have been able to tighten the calibration of our performance monitoring thresholds to such a degree that we are now resolving minor degradations before they become out-of-service issues, and in effect, we are now operating much more like a preventative service organization.”

Service management at Rogers for Business now applies many of the principles of air traffic control; a command center where monitoring every detail is vital to overall operational success. An air traffic controller uses real-time information to monitor flight plans and provide guidance to pilots, intervening with authority when necessary. Similarly, Technical Services analysts are constantly monitoring network health, case volume, quality standards, events, and customer-specific intelligence, and sharing relevant information with technicians to take proactive action when required.

“Our efforts to transform our operation from a reactive, to a proactive, to a preventative service model have been challenging, but it has been made easier by our consistent use of ServiceNow.

“We’ve leveraged ServiceNow’s out-of-the-box IT Service Management framework as common practice, enabling us to focus on the more conceptual aspect of our transformation, which was to connect our employees with our customers with the power of immediacy.”

Passion and commitment
Scott says that the power of ServiceNow has been a catalyst for many positive changes that have been realized by customers, employees, and the business.

Scott says that the power of ServiceNow has been a catalyst for many positive changes that have been realized by customers, employees, and the business.

“What we are really interested in is how we are performing against our concept of immediacy, that we genuinely care about and respect our customer’s situation, and that we’re taking action, right now. We call that ‘immediate reassurance and confident resolution’, which neatly sums up how we want customers to feel about Rogers in every single interaction.

“In a nutshell, we want customers to feel good about Rogers for Business, that we’re a partner, and that we get how important our services are to them. And internally that means that the North Star that drives our actions has shifted from our own personal responsibilities to what the customer is experiencing. They come first and that’s a fundamental shift.”

Rogers for Business Service Assurance has reduced daily ticket volumes by 41% by fixing problems before they happen, and inbound calls reduced by 19% by reaching out to customers to tell them about a problem and how the company is solving it.

“Status-chasing calls have been cut by 43%, again by reaching out, keeping customers constantly, proactively informed of how we are assisting them. The results are encouraging, with 71% of customers giving us a nine or ten out of ten in our ‘likelihood to recommend’ surveys.

“ServiceNow is a great partner. This is a true transformation that has been achieved without the traditional, big capital-heavy lift but through the hard work and ingenuity of our teams.”

Achieving a cultural shift
In conclusion, Scott points to two catalytic events that accelerated the cultural transformation that is essential for the adoption of new technologies to succeed. The first was a series of mudslides that impacted Rogers’ network and services in western Canada, just as the iconic Saturday night Hockey Night show was about to broadcast. The second was the COVID-19 pandemic.

“My team’s response to the first of these was outstanding; everyone was in hyper-vigilant, proactive mode, fully invested in the process, producing real-time updates on the actions that were being taken to restore services. This was a very dangerous situation for Rogers, but everyone reacted so well, that we all knew that this was now our benchmark, our North Star. This was the standard we had set ourselves.

“Then, during the early stages of COVID-19, our networks and services were under tremendous strain as demand soared. And then we were also at the heart of the processing of our federal government’s Canadian Emergency Response Benefit payments. The pressure to get all this right was immense, for everyone.

“What both events showed our people was that the work they do is of fundamental national importance – and they have what they need within them to deliver a great response. ServiceNow’s contribution has been integral to this.

“It has given us the tools to be consistent and enabled us to win the hearts and minds of our people by creating a much more efficient domain for them to do great work and be successful and fulfilled in their jobs.

“And happy, stimulated people tend to stay longer and perform to a higher level. As a result, employee satisfaction in our team of 250 people is now at 91%.”

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