We've built our business on a deep desire to give our customers what they want, and a true dedication to serving them well. When it comes to customer service we want to get it right first time, every time, 365 days a year.
We see customer service as one of the mainstays of our success - now and in the future. That's why managers of all levels regularly set aside time to listen in at our contact centres, and join our field engineers when they're making home visits. There's no substitute for direct feedback like that, and we are constantly talking to our customers. We regularly undertake focus and research groups that canvas the views of people who are already Sky customers, as well as some who aren't.
What we're aiming for is a real relationship with our customers - a genuine two-way dialogue rather than the one-way communication most viewers have with traditional TV. We've upgraded our customer management systems, investing both in people and technology. This project was completed in March 2006, and we now have a fully-integrated system that links our telephone contact centres with our 3,500 field engineers, who are connected via hand-held computers. The result is that the customer gets a faster, more efficient and more synchronised service on everything from installations, to repairs, to moving house.
The upgrade also gives us a system with a lot more capacity, and the ability to cope both with developments in technology and the projected growth in our customer base. We were already dealing with over a million calls and 60,000 home visits a week, but we now have 2,000 more customer service advisors, 600 new engineers, and a computer database that can cope with over 10 million customers and more than two trillion separate pieces of data.
Our average customer satisfaction rating across all customer interactions was approximately 90% over the past year (the number of people saying our services are good or very good). The 10% that didn't hit this mark were usually as a result of some inflexibility in our processes, or a breakdown in communications between the contact centre and the engineers in the field: the new system is especially designed to address exactly these issues.
At the same time, having a fully-integrated system means that our contact centre staff can give customers better advice: the more we know about each individual customer, the more help we can give them on the sort of packages that will suit them best, and any new options available to them. We're backing this up by giving our customer service staff a lot more scope to use their initiative when dealing with customer requests - from giving a free movie to surprise and delight a loyal customer, to sending out a gift voucher to say sorry when we've got something wrong. It's all about going the extra mile so that every customer knows how important they are to us.
It's all part of the same basic philosophy: if choice, flexibility and innovation are the key to getting new customers, it's great service that will help us keep them.