ANTONIO IVANKOVIC has recently taken up the newly created role of chief Customer Experience officer at GO plc. In this interview we discuss what the role actually means and what motivated him to accept the challenge.

Chief Customer Experience officer is a new role at GO. What does it mean?

Put simply, customer experience is the sum of all the interactions a person has with a specific brand, throughout the entire relationship between the two. As chief Customer Experience officer my role is to help GO deliver the best possible experience to everyone who comes into contact with our brand, regardless of their relationship with us or the channel through which that contact occurs.

It sounds like you are taking on a big challenge?

Getting customer experience right is a challenge and not just for GO. I think if you ask any telco in the world, they will agree that the industry as a whole needs to do better. The challenge also gets harder every day as customers increasingly compare the service offered by telcos not against other telcos, but against the service offered by other sectors. When you have big disruptors like Amazon, Airbnb, Uber etc., all creating new, personal, engaging experiences, the bar for everyone else just gets higher. That said, one of the main reasons that I decided to leave Silicon Valley and join GO was that I see a real ambition here to get this right. Customer experience at GO is in fact being structured in a way that I have not seen anywhere else. By bringing ownership of every customer facing channel under one roof, starting from the call centre, to retail outlets, and online, a genuine opportunity has been created to make GO a customer centric organisation, and to set a fantastic precedent for our industry.

You mentioned that your previous role was in Silicon Valley in the United States. What were you doing there and how hard was it to leave?

Before joining GO, I worked with Deutsche Telekom as senior manager Partnering and Business Development. Essentially my role, based in Silicon Valley, was to discover new and innovative partnering opportunities for the business. I was particularly focused on the areas of Digital Care and Sales and Seamless Connectivity so the opportunity that emerged at GO was also a natural next step, switching from the supply side to the demand side, a step closer to customers. Obviously Silicon Valley is an amazing place to work, full of talent and innovation, and with a very well established start-up ecosystem. But it's not the only place in the world where you can find these things and, particularly from an EU perspective, there are plenty of sectors and industries where Europe is performing exceptionally. Leaving was difficult but, as I mentioned earlier, there's an ambition at GO to create something unique when it comes to customer experience. That ambition, coupled with the opportunity of deploying some of the innovations I experienced in the States, made the decision to move to Malta a very appealing one.

How have you found settling in Malta, and at GO?

I have only been here since the start of this year, but I can already say with confidence that Malta is a great place to be, and that GO is a fantastic company. I have lived and worked in many countries over the years, and I've never experienced a welcome like the one I have had here. I already feel very much at home and I am not surprised that Malta frequently ranks as one of the top countries in Europe for people to settle down in. It's also clear to me that Malta is a very digital savvy society which is open to innovation. This is great news for GO, which  I believe is, in essence, society's enabler and accelerator in the adoption of emerging technologies, all of which depend on a robust and resilient telecoms Infrastructure. My colleagues at GO have been great. The team is already very focussed on delivering a great customer experience and our network, which includes Malta's fastest mobile network and an ever growing fixed fibre footprint, means we have all the prerequisites in place to take our relationship with customers to a whole new level.

You say that the team at GO is already focussed on delivering great customer experience and that the network is also in place. So what's missing?

GO definitely has both the team and the network in place to deliver a great customer experience but that's not enough. You need the right internal structures and resources to support the team and help them to deliver. Bringing all customer facing channels under one roof is an important start. To ensure a seamless customer experience we need to better manage information and this is where technology can play an important role. To give you an example, if a customer contacts us through Facebook and then decides to continue the conversation with a phone call or a visit to a retail outlet, the person speaking with that customer needs to know what was said on Facebook, and also have access to the right information to be able to serve the customer in a satisfactory manner. It might sound simple but it's very hard to pull off when you have thousands of contacts across so many channels happening every day. This is where investment in information management systems and even Artificial Intelligence will become more important. GO is taking action on this front and we have plans in place to invest in new tools and approaches for all our customer facing channels and we are also changing the way we evaluate our performance to ensure we are looking at things from a customer perspective. Obviously in the medium- to long-term we will also continue to invest in mobile and fibre to continue offering outstanding coverage, secure access and great bandwidth. GO's aim is to be a customer centric, digital organisation, which delivers the best connectivity and content on every screen, while at home or on the road, while at the same time listening to and serving our customers across all channels equally.