Superlative Customer Service Easier Said Than Done

A Case Study

Every wannabe competitive local exchange carrier (CLEC) on the continent claims it’s going to steal market share from the incumbent by paying fanatical attention to customer service. But most find out it’s easier said than done: Good customer relationships take a lot of care and feeding. Customers can be awfully demanding.

That’s one reason GT Group Telecom Inc., a voice/data CLEC in Vancouver, Canada, is developing E-care, a suite of e-commerce services for customers. GT hasn’t implemented its E-care strategy yet, but we will be tracking the firm’s progress.

The idea is simple: Use the Internet to assist in delivering superlative customer service.  That will give customers faster access to information and simplify interaction between customer and company.  And, potentially, GT will do well by doing good: It stands to realize significant savings with this plan.

This month we’ll fill you in on what GT plans to do and what it expects to get out of E-care. Later we’ll check back and see how it’s doing.

The Company
GT calls itself a next generation telecommunications provider. Although it’s officially three years old, it has only been pursuing its current facilities-based-CLEC strategy for a little over a year. So far, it offers basic voice and data services and some interesting application services – including IP-based unified messaging – to mostly small and medium-size business customers in Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton. GT owns fiber in all three cities.

Recently, the company purchased Shaw FiberLink, the Competitive Access Provider (CAP) arm of one of Canada’s major cable television service providers. The acquisition gives GT fiber capacity in important eastern Canadian markets. Now it has an ambitious plan to roll out services across the country. It recently announced an IPO to raise more funds to do this.

“As a company, we’re focusing on a service innovation strategy and implementing a client relationship management approach,” says Alex Kroon, vice president of customer service. “We believe E-care will help increase customer loyalty, obviously add value for customers, provide opportunities for upsell and also reduce our costs.”

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