Partner content: To thrive, operators must become digital service innovators, setting new standards in service delivery, quality and performance
Customer service is in the news again as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) recently opened an inquiry into the quality of customer support across the telco industry, including broadband, cable, satellite and voice services. The aim of the inquiry is to empower consumers to “easily cancel subscriptions, talk to live customer representatives, improve accessibility of customer service engagement and more”.
Across the Pond, a British review of the best customer service from operators by Choose, a fair price comparison site, marked only four major providers that have complaint levels in line with or below industry standards, with some complaints driven by faults, service and provisioning.
Look at the whole
Customer service is clearly only part of the customer experience battle. Operators often have to contend with technical problems, natural disasters, power outages, or cyber attacks which could fuel further customer frustration. Cogent Communications for example suffered an outage in August that impacted thousands of customers in all regions, across the US, Britain and Europe alike that lasted over an hour in some areas.
In France, fiber optic cables were sabotaged in July, resulting in outages across the country and impacting telecom firms Bouygues, SFR and Free. While Telenor in Norway, experienced an outage at the beginning of September due to a technical error that also impacted customers of Telia and Ice, and prevented the public from accessing the emergency number 112 for three hours. The incident was reminiscent of a similar occurrence in the UK in 2023 that lasted 10.5 hours and affected 14,000 emergency calls.
While operators and businesses may have implemented generative AI and other advanced technologies in an effort to offer new options, customer experience is still experiencing an unprecedented low. This is particularly true for the telecom industry. A global survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers suggested that customer experience is still “fundamental and necessary condition for pricing power.”
The consulting firm stressed that telecoms need to “rethink the entire customer experience: the network, the device, sales and service and the potential to provide value-added products and services.”
It is becoming clear that deploying generative AI, advanced 5G and other technologies, is no longer enough. For operators to thrive, it is essential to become digital service innovators, setting new standards in service delivery, quality, and performance to match enhanced speeds and provide optimal customer experience.
Focus on reliability
Customers demand and expect reliability. A recent study found that telecom subscribers prefer to pay higher prices for products or services they know and trust and are less sensitive to price changes. Customer satisfaction is driven by perceived value for money (49%) and reliability (48%), with tailored offerings and speed following behind according to another report.
In fact, 42% of customers will show more loyalty to their provider spending four times more than new ones, confirming that telcos should be placing more efforts to retain existing customers.
Operators need to implement a process of monitoring, evaluating and enhancing quality of services and understand the actual customer experience in real-time.
Automated assurance solutions offer a way to fully understand the subscriber’s true experience, both as a collective group and an individual. They can drill down to provide deep insights into the customer experience, offer usage trends and deliver service analysis across multiple devices and technologies.
With a 360-degree view of the customer experience in one package, operators save time through anomaly detection, anticipate potential churners, and resolve issues quickly and efficiently. They can also benefit from increased loyalty, and additional upselling or cross-selling opportunities.
Vendors like RADCOM, that incorporate artificial intelligence and machine learning into the assurance solution package, are able to provide a pro-active means to identify problems before they impact the subscriber, and gain end-to-end customer experience visibility. Operators can compare a subscriber customer experience index to a network baseline and correlate real-time subscriber analytics from the RAN to the edge, to the core.
With advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, operators can understand the genuine customer experience even with encrypted data, utilizing automated anomaly detection and recommendations to correct faults quickly.
Shift to customer-centric focus
Our reliance on digital devices, and voice and data services, has become essential to daily life. Telecom operators, at the center of these critical digital systems in every country, need to usher in a new era of customer-centric digital service innovation in order to remain relevant. And this must be fuelled by enhanced standards in quality, performance and delivery.
The author, Michal Fridman, is VP Marketing at RADCOM