Good news for people who have DStv Premium in South Africa

MultiChoice South Africa CEO Byron du Plessis says the company is developing a priority support service for DStv Premium subscribers as one of several projects to enhance its value proposition.

Du Plessis said the aim is to further differentiate the experience for Premium customers beyond just providing more content, as they already pay for everything DStv has to offer.

He explained that their focus was on two key areas: an anticipatory service experience and improvements to the DStv Rewards programme.

“I’ve actually spent a lot of my time over the last six months at customer touchpoints in different regions,” Du Plessis told MyBroadband.

“I was in our branches, agencies, and walk-in centres to understand what the customer service data we’re seeing actually means.”

Du Plesis wanted to know how customers experience DStv, Showmax, and MultiChoice as a brand.

“We’re really looking at the data really deeply to say, ‘Is it really reflecting the state of our customer?’” he said.

Three or four months ago, Du Plessis told the MultiChoice support team that they must strive for more than just having a satisfied customer at the end of an interaction.

“We actually shifted our metrics now from satisfaction to happiness,” he said.

“We’ve said that we actually want the interaction with our customers to be a good experience — a better than good experience.”

He acknowledged that this was difficult to achieve. When a customer seeks support, it’s usually to address a grievance, such as billing concerns, or their decoder not working.

“How do you create an environment where you turn that experience into something positive, right?” Du Plessis said.

In speaking with customers, Du Plessis said they’ve identified several areas where they can make changes that will improve customer happiness — some of them quite counterintuitive.

“Sometimes customers don’t talk to you about the content on the platform. They talk to you about why they can’t get more value on their Uber voucher for their rewards,” he said.

While your product must be good for customers to be happy, Du Plessis explained that he realised many small things in their rewards programme that could be improved, which would make people very happy.

Another thing they noticed was that customers with PVR or access to DStv’s streaming services do not complain about repeats.

Du Plessis said that subscribers with PVR decoders or who use the DStv apps are more often watching general entertainment content on Catch Up and live programming on traditional channels.

One solution to this was to make PVR decoders more affordable. However, Du Plessis said that customer interviews also showed that many people were unfamiliar with how to use DStv’s on-demand functionality.

“We went to the Durban CBD, where there was a queue of people outside the customer care centre, and I asked why agents were not coaching people about downloading and using the Showmax and DStv Stream apps,” he said.

The agents told Du Plessis they didn’t do that because customers feared using their data.

“So what we’ll be doing now is implementing free Wi-Fi in all of the walk-in centres,” he said.

“Now, when people are waiting, they have something to do, and we can actually show them the different apps and services that we provide, like managing their bill from the app.”

Priority support

For Premium customers, Du Plessis said they are creating a priority support experience, taking inspiration from the added value banks provide to their high-end customers.

One of the goals is to detect and solve a customer’s problem before they even realise they have one.

Premium customers will also not have to wait in call centre queues to get service, but will have their own dedicated support channel.

Agents for premium customers will undergo a much longer training period, 12 to 16 weeks, compared to the usual three to four weeks.

Trained agents will provide a monitoring service on premium accounts. For example, if they see that a customer’s account is about to be disconnected due to an unpaid bill, they will proactively call to remind them.

They might also remind customers about upcoming content, such as a rugby match, if they know the customer is a fan, to prevent them from missing out due to disconnection.

Du Plessis said this anticipatory and proactive approach aims to provide premium customers with value for money beyond just the content they are paying for.

Premium rewards

Another way MultiChoice wants to add value to its Premium package is by releasing more “money can’t buy” experiences as part of the DStv rewards programme.

He explained that DStv Premium customers would immediately qualify for the highest DStv Rewards tier without needing to do anything else.

Du Plessis said they have access to thousands of unique experiences through SuperSport and their general entertainment partnerships.

Examples include opportunities like early bird tickets for Springbok matches, playing in a golf shootout with the MultiChoice CEO, or visiting the Shaka iLembe set with Toyota and doing an off-road driving course.

Du Plessis said the aim was to reveal experiences weekly that would effectively pay back the value of an annual DStv Premium subscription.

“The rewards programme is something we’ve set some ambitious goals around as a business,” he said.