SK Telecom (017670) Chief Executive Chung Jae-hun said the company will repay customer trust with better service after topping the mobile carrier category in all three of South Korea's major customer satisfaction surveys this year, a year after a hacking breach.
Chung made the remarks in an essay posted on the SK Telecom newsroom on the 1st, saying the company takes the results "all the more meaningfully and seriously because this is a result confirmed by customer evaluations in the year after we damaged customer trust."
SK Telecom ranked first in the mobile carrier category in all three of the country's leading customer satisfaction surveys this year: the National Customer Satisfaction Index (NCSI), the Korean Standard-Service Quality Index (KS-SQI) and the Korean Customer Satisfaction Index (KCSI).
"This year's customer satisfaction results mean more than a simple recovery of our ranking," Chung said. "They are a valuable assessment that our efforts are translating into changes that customers can feel." He added: "What matters now goes beyond how quickly we regained first place — it is what made that change possible and how we will sustain it. The answer lay with the customers who trusted and waited for SK Telecom even in the moment of crisis."
Chung noted that SK Telecom employees visited 87 cities and counties nationwide this year and met about 35,000 customers in person. "Customers told us in detail about the inconveniences they felt in daily life and the changes they wanted, from network quality to roaming, membership programs and pricing plans," he said. "We did not stop at listening to customer voices — we changed things one by one so that customers could feel the difference in their daily lives."
Among the main efforts to restore customer trust, he cited stronger artificial intelligence-based security and public disclosure of information protection activities, the simplification of complex benefits such as roaming and pricing plans, and the operation of a customer trust committee made up of a customer advisory panel and outside experts. "Through the customer trust committee, composed of a customer advisory panel and outside experts, we reflect the frank voices of customers and outside experts in management, and the customer advisory panel takes part directly in planning SK Telecom's products and services," Chung said. "We will turn customer voices into change, and that change into firmer trust."
