Constantly emerging technologies enable telecom companies to redesign and deliver new high-quality levels of customer interaction. Although improving customer experience is considered one of the crucial strategic priorities for the sector, growing expectations and market disruption create additional obstacles on the way to achieve this objective.
The key challenges of European telecoms
European telecoms are recently reporting significant decrease in sales of up to 20 % by 2020, mainly due to the fact that consumer bases are incomplete and generated from poorly interconnected sources. So, it’s a daunting task to identify and pair consumers. At that, legacy IT systems lack flexibility and overall processes face obstacles (e.g., it’s hard to distinguish the end user and the connection owner for fixed network services).
Customer data from various sources is not integrated or stored in a single place. Finally, industry workers don’t have deep knowledge about the customers, just the basics, so there’s no easy way to create personalized offers.
Get to know your customers and learn about their true needs!
It’s rather obvious that telecom customers have long been digitized - technology is everywhere. They tend to interact with a telecom through such digital contact points as: web pages, social networks, e-mail messages, web shops, etc. Customers are looking for a highly positive experience throughout the stages of customer journey and at all contact points. For instance, when contact centre agents are attentive, the chances are very high that customers will leave a positive feedback about the rendered services.
Personalized services and offers are especially valuable
Telecom companies should adopt the smart use of digital technologies with an aim to uncover the habits, needs and interests of the customers and develop a better experience. Here’s exactly when Customer Relationship Management (CRM) comes to play. It collects data from various internal and external sources, storing all customer information collected at points of sale or contact centres, e-mail marketing, web shops at a central place.
As a result, the collected data allows the companies to understand the customers much better, as well as to create targeted marketing and sales activities and, finally, to enhance sales.
What’s the main goal of digitalization and where exactly it takes place?
No doubt, the key objective of digitalization is to provide a unique customer experience at all communication and sales channels. Hence, telecoms expect drastic changes in the following 3 areas of operations:
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Omnichannel sales: by integrating traditional and digital sales channels and offering an outstanding experience to customer, one will get a chance to increase sales. To ensure positive interaction with the brand, both online and offline, CRM is the method that allows one to monitor the customers on all channels and offer them personalized services.
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E-care: through user profiles on web pages, social networks, mobile apps, telecoms provide services in the digital world. Research showed that telecom customers prefer online interaction.
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Digital processes: as customers expect an intuitive interface on all digital channels, interaction on digital contact points has an enormous impact on customer satisfaction with a telecom’s services and products. Among all the digital channels, web pages are the most influential. Customers want intuitive and interactive pages where, with only a few clicks, they can find the required information.
Digital services and operations are altering literally every sector. To capture the opportunity, the companies need to embrace a new operating model that dramatically improves the digital customer experience. In order to success, the industry players need to consider the following factors: designing and digitizing customer journeys, increasing speed and agility in insight generation, achieving customer adoption of digital customer journeys, just to name a few.
Due to the complex nature of the digital customer journey transformation, a combination of traditional transformation elements, including top-management commitment, cross-functional teamwork, and agile delivery of technology is required.
What does customer-centric design of customer journeys look like?
The primary goal would be to thoroughly rethink the way the journey works, instead of simply fixing inefficiencies along the way. In such a way, such an approach helps to render the customer journey in a clickable prototype in order to obtain a more concrete look and feel of the actual customer experience, which can then be continuously tested with customers.
Also, it is essential to achieve internal alignment in the organization across channel and business-unit leadership. Conflicts that arise among leaders on strategy, targets, incentives, and mind-sets can be highly disruptive.
On the other hand, service providers have chosen to implement digital BSS for greater ease and simplicity in administering customer accounts, so that customers can find information online, compare offerings, make online purchases and more. In other cases, service providers have invested in telco data analytics – in order to obtain real time actionable insights into the customer journey, so that they can proactively respond to the needs of the customer.
Overall, there’s plenty of alternatives, yet, telecom service providers should be ready to continuously evolve their customer journey into a zero-touch future – where interaction will be based on voice and gestures and supported by artificial intelligence.
Improving customer experience delivers real benefits to companies that successfully execute customer-centric strategies. As a consequence, happy customers display deeper loyalty and contribute to the higher employee engagement. Telecom continuously reinvents itself by delivering simple, immediate, and individualized experiences driven by their key objective - building of the dynamic shared digital ecosystems around customer needs and rendering of the best services possible.
