PLDT and its wireless arm Smart Communications, Inc. (Smart) are ramping-up company-wide efforts to improve customer experience by enhancing employee skills and encouraging hyper-collaboration within the company, in line with the group’s core value of malasakit.
“It is important that we are excellent in three things: operational efficiency, innovation and customer experience – with the customers as our North Star,” said Alfredo S. Panlilio, PLDT Inc and Smart Communications President and CEO. “We must break silos and hyper-collaborate across all teams to make this happen.”
Following this revitalized company-wide customer-centric push, over 10,000 customers have been assisted by more than 2,600 customer champions from various units at PLDT and Smart between March and June 2021 alone.
The initiative reinforces existing efforts by the company to improve customer service. It traces its roots at the beginning of the pandemic in March last year, when lockdown restrictions highlighted the need for connectivity and digital services as more Filipinos stayed at home to work, study, and stay in touch with loved ones. This in turn underscored the importance of ramping up the company’s capacity to cater to customer concerns. Responding to Panlilio’s call, employees stepped forward to get involved and advocated for the brands by providing customers much-needed assistance.
“Regardless of our roles in the company, we are all equipped to help a customer when the need arises. We are ambassadors of excellent service,” Panlilio stressed, adding that PLDT and Smart have put in place a dedicated platform that facilitates efficient hyper-collaboration across various teams and business units, and are implementing a roster of in-house trainings to further equip PLDT and Smart employees with enhanced product knowledge and CX skills.
“We thank our customer champions for making this possible and serving our customers with passion and purpose. Indeed, our malasakit has come a long way,” Panlilio said.
These customer champions are proof that all employees can be channels of customer service. Says one customer champion who was able to help her neighbor’s business: “My neighbor reached out to me asking for my assistance because they were having problems with their connection, which was affecting their online business. So, I took their details, submitted it, and had their concern resolved. Now, the business is operating well amid the pandemic and they’re happily serving their customers. The assistance we render to our customer goes a long way. Kaya kahit hindi ako frontliner, hindi ko sila tinatanggihan!”
This effort gave all employees an efficient platform to reinforce PLDT’s group-wide commitment to realizing our vision for PLDT and Smart as truly customer-centric – with leading-edge technology – empowering all Filipinos in building a stronger nation, providing world-class connectivity as a human right, asserting the Philippines as a key player in the global arena and actively embarking on sustainable development to secure everyone’s future.
This relentless drive to raise the level of customer service goes hand in hand with the continuous rollout of PLDT and Smart’s core asset, their nationwide, fully integrated fixed and wireless networks. PLDT’s fiber infrastructure is the country’s most extensive at over 478,000 kilometers as of end-March 2021. This infrastructure supports Smart’s mobile network, which serves 96% of the population from Batanes to Tawi-Tawi.
