Telecom customer experience has become one of the biggest factors for driving customer loyalty and revenue growth in the industry. Telcos must become far more agile to deliver a superior experience and embrace technological advancements.
As a matter of fact, the expectations of customers—whether a consumer or an SMB – have evolved and become more challenging within a highly competitive business landscape. Retaining high-value customers (both B2C and B2B) relies heavily on the customer experience they get.
A customer-focused telco will not only convert new leads but keep them for many years to come. Having said that, the probability of selling to an existing customer is 60-70% versus selling to a new prospect at just 5-20%. When a customer enjoys dealing with you, its customer lifetime value increases. Selling more products and services as well as maintaining profitability follows through as a result.
A study found that a 5% or more increase in the retention rate can lead to a 25% or more increase in profits. Indeed, a loyal customer tends to buy 90% more frequently than a customer who does not feel satisfied with their provider. With a lot of options in the market, ensuring the best telecom customer experience is a necessity.
Digital services and new technologies are crucial to telcos’ ability to derive insights about customers and optimize customer interactions accordingly. This will empower a seamless, personalized experience and interactions across channels throughout the customer journey.
Customers are Important Assets
No matter how marketable a product or service is, if customers are not buying it, there is no use. Did you know that one in three adults consider a single bad customer experience enough to consider switching providers? This again points out why telcos must make customer experience a priority in providing best-in-class services.
It has been known that Middle East telco operators are more focused on digitalizing their journey, leading to more intuitive, convenient, and trusted relationships with customers.
To help telcos remain relevant, improving levels of support and personalization are seen as the most important routes to improving telecom customer experience in the Middle East. It is worth noting that customer experience involves excellence in operations and service design as well as digital transformation.
Based on a GSMA survey, 85% of operators in the 5G era will play the role of digital service providers. This transition from CSP to DSP is necessary as customer experience becomes more proactive. Putting more value on digital customer service channels and improving engagement are key drivers to customer retention and long-term loyalty.
An exceptional telco customer journey gives the customers what they need and want, and nowadays, a digital-first approach works. Digital onboarding, eKYC, and intuitive live chats are preferred over lining up at in-store kiosks.
Certainly, the strategy has to change to optimize customer value. Telcos need to reduce losses, prevent churn and maximize revenue on their offerings. How? By focusing on not only acquisition and retention but also the entire customer lifecycle. The focus on the next best action (NBA) can bring customers their desired core experience, coupled with technology.
Products to Customers: The NBA Approach
To meet customer expectations within the telecom industry, reducing customer effort, creating benefits from product usage, and satisfying emotional needs are critical. Helping telcos to shift to a more customer-centric approach than products is the next best action (NBA) capability.
Adopting an NBA approach gives telcos a multidimensional view of their customers. By combining big data with artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML), telcos can integrate the next best action models. These NBA models predict future lifetime value and make smart and advantageous recommendations.
Taking into consideration the next best action, operators can be more strategic across all touchpoints. These include personalizing and targeting offers, retaining the most profitable customers, managing omnichannel interactions, and rendering services quickly.
Every enterprise and individual would benefit from an NBA approach. With AI/ML, telcos will be able to know their customer personas better and provide highly contextualized services. Deep diving into consumer behavior will ultimately reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction.
With more accurate data analytics and value calculations and the right layer of real-time technologies like cloud and virtual assistants, telcos can continually innovate their customer experience and transform themselves into data-driven organizations.
No doubt that data and technology are fundamentally changing the business model, driven by the belief that a superior telecom customer experience is a key lever for the industry’s future success. Predictive analytics like NBA has advanced to be more accurate and leads to higher customer value.
Also, telcos closely monitor and manage possible setbacks in customer service performance and quality by using quality of experience (QoE) features in their networks, OSS/BSS systems, and customer devices.
Effective Customer Value Management
Along with the next best action model, telcos must strengthen their customer value management (CVM) capability to deliver simplicity and self-sufficiency; agility for faster time-to-market; real-time engagement; and co-creation of digital services.
This capability covers the telecom customer experience at every stage, relying on a combination of tactics, including customer payback period, budget rebalancing, tailored customer rewards, and cross- and up-selling campaigns.
The customer experience trends in telecom push operators to embrace the growing trends for intelligent automation, self-service, and other AI-powered tools. These will make sure that customers will get consistent service in every channel.
If operators want to keep growing profits, they will have to focus on the value of each and every customer in their current base. A first-rate, data-driven CVM engine allows telcos to be extremely precise in understanding what their customers need and how to target them.
A forecast projected that CSPs will spend about $14 billion per year on customer engagement automation until 2025. The potential for additional value creation becomes much greater when modern, cloud-based and automated engagement solutions are utilized. This will tap into new 5G and IoT revenue streams and deliver an advanced digital experience for both enterprises and consumers.