What Makes For ‘Brilliant’ CX? EE’s Will Harmer Explains

The U.K. mobile network’s head of insights, optimisation and personalisation focuses on using data to tailor online customer journeys and empower the entire business.

What Makes For ‘Brilliant’ CX? EE’s Will Harmer Explains

When you’re working in a saturated market, your biggest challenge becomes retaining your existing customers.

This is where U.K. mobile operator EE finds itself, according to Will Harmer, its senior manager—insights, optimisation, and personalisation.

“Almost everyone in the U.K. has got a smart phone and a network, so there aren’t really new customers left for us to sell to,” he told CMO.com recently. “As a consequence, we’ve got a really big challenge around keeping our existing customers happy.”

For EE, this means it’s vital to provide a “brilliant” customer experience. For Harmer in turn, it means two things. The first is understanding the key online customer journeys, optimising them to remove customer pain points, and increasingly personalising them so that people get to where they need to be quickly and efficiently, and get the answer they need when they get there.

The second is what he calls “the democratisation of data around the business.”

“We want the whole business to be using the wealth of data that we have in digital because that’s one of the key advantages that you have with a digital platform—the data that you collect,” he said.

“The footprints the customers leave and the discussions they have with us are through the data we collect, so if we can impart that data to our colleagues around the business, then they can make decisions that make our customer experiences better and really drive those brilliant experiences we’re seeking.”