Inside Globe is a heart for the customer

MANILA, Philippines - Ernest Cu is a CEO on a mission: to provide the best customer service and experience to Globe Telecom’s over 33-million subscribers.

To get there, the 20-year company veteran has sparked major changes when he assumed the leadership mantle of Globe in 2009 – reorienting a business-focused mindset to a workforce with a deep passion to provide the best service to its customers.

With the foundation laid, Cu spearheaded a total transformation of Globe to serve its customers better – establishing a customer-first culture, building a brand new network and leveraging best-in-class information technology, and impassioning and empowering the people.

Now Globe is reaping the fruits of all their hard work. The company has been reporting record growth momentum for the past two years and producing better mobile and broadband products that bring out the Globe brand essence of doing things “your way.” Globe also continues to deliver superior customer experience, providing multiple customer service channels in various platforms to give a variety of options for subscribers where they can easily ask for after-sales support wherever they are and whatever time of the day.

Cu recently gave a talk at the De La Salle University’s 3rd Strategic Management Alumni Association Convention and in it, he shared the people-building efforts in Globe that holistically make the company’s total transformation gel together. An edited version of his speech follows:

“Today the customer is at the center of Globe. We’ve come a long way from the old public utility we once were to the customer-focused public service provider we are now. Customer First is the differentiating philosophy in telecommunications that I had been espousing since I assumed leadership as president and CEO in 2009. Going forward I would like to offer a glimpse of our company’s transformation to serve customers better.

Kick-starting Customer First culture

Even with the best talents and the best of intentions, bred from a desire to take our business to soaring flight once again after several years of missing corporate targets, it painfully dawned on me that focusing purely on business – casing, analyzing, and scrutinizing every cost to monetize and milk all possible benefit had drawn focus away from what we truly were.

We were fundamentally a public service company, yet mindless ‘process-based’ decisions locked our eyes on numbers, spreadsheets, and numb rules of engagement, when our hearts should have been purely bleeding the passion to provide the best service for our very reason for being. The Customer.

Thus I immediately set out to harness every bit of intelligence, skill and competency by impassioning our employees, Ka-Globe as we fondly call each other, towards achieving our true goal - to serve our customers better.

One of the initiatives I personally championed to kick-start the crucial paradigm shift was the Globe Customer First Circle (CFC) program. CFC helped the organization deliver a superior customer experience while embedding a culture of customer centricity and continuous improvement. With the CFC program structure, processes, and incentives – employees take accountability and ownership over transformative efforts in their respective functional spheres. To date, CFC has generated billions in annualized benefits after the completion of hundreds of projects since its inception in 2009.

Transforming infrastructure

The needs of the customers changed from the days of simple texting and calling to a demand for mobile data.  The rapid increase in mobile data traffic, as more and more Filipinos surf on the go, check their Facebook or tweet in transit squarely put onus on Globe to change infrastructure. So Globe began a $700-million transformation to build a brand new network and install IT systems, aggressively turning things upside down and inside out, investing ultimately in what our customers truly want and will evolve into. Because that is what putting customer first means.

Impassioning and empowering Ka-Globe

At this point let me add a critical qualification, the customer we speak of is external and internal. After all our vision in Globe is to have the happiest customers and employees. Every Ka-Globe is a key piece in the total equation, and they have to feel accountable for the overall success or failure of our organization.

I and other Globe senior leaders personally invest in making an effort to be visible to employees through our town-hall type forums, minding and mining the pulse of our entire employee base, while they in turn align their roles to greater corporate goals.

Though still without the benefit of fully finished brand new infrastructure, but with over 5,000 Globe employees latched on to the professional values of customer service and customer focus, we have achieved greater things. I believe that the business momentum we ride today is the blossoming fruit of Ka-Globe united by collective ownership of our mission and vision.

An impassioned workforce and awesome infrastructure are the keys; however in order to foster long haul competitive advantage, we have to have the best-trained and most developed people in the industry. Thus empowering people is of paramount importance in Globe. To this end, we have a thoughtful roster of people development programs with the objective of professional empowerment to serve customers better.

At the end of the day, professional success and industry leadership hinge on customer-focused people who truly do make all the difference – that commitment to the customer is true north on a cultural compass to deliver the superior experience.”