Operators and businesses may have implemented generative AI and other advanced technologies, yet surprisingly, customer experience in the US has sunk to an unprecedented low across all businesses and industries. The telecom industry is not immune, with a new report from PricewaterhouseCoopers explaining that telecom companies “have to rethink the entire customer experience – network, device, sales and service.”
Regular telecommunications outages due to technical problems or natural disasters only fuel further customer frustration. The recent Hurricane Helene, for example, has affected several providers across the US, impacting hundreds of thousands, if not millions. Forrester estimates that even an 11-hour telecoms outage can cost something around $500 million to the economy, highlighting how critical communications infrastructure has become. Continual communication is not only vital for customer satisfaction, but any disruption can result in the loss of reputation, business, and even access to lifesaving personnel. European tier-one operators also had to publicly apologize to their customers over the last few months as outages shut down connectivity, affecting enterprises, critical IoT devices, and, in some cases, even emergency services.
Customer-centric strategies
Telecom operators are expanding their 5G network in an effort to improve coverage and deliver enhanced 5G services to customers. However, while they upgrade technologies, adapting customer-centric strategies is even more critical. It is no longer enough to focus on understanding the overall satisfaction and perception of the customers. To maintain customer loyalty, telcos need to become digital service innovators, setting the standards in service delivery, quality, and performance to match enhanced speeds. This means that operators need to implement a process of monitoring, evaluating, and enhancing the quality of services to understand the actual customer experience in real time.
Reliability is key. 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. Another study showed that customer satisfaction is driven by perceived value for money (49%) and reliability (48%), with tailored offerings and speed following behind. The study also revealed that 42% of customers show higher degrees of loyalty to their providers (over six years), spending four times more than new ones. Endeavoring to retain existing customers, therefore, is about five times cheaper than bringing in new customers.
Decoding the customer experience
While 73% of telecom executives understand the importance of a digital service innovator approach to retaining customers, McKinsey pointed out that executives lack specific information about customers’ authentic experiences that influence their decisions. They need a way to translate information about the customer into meaningful insights that can drive personalized experiences.
Automated intelligent assurance solutions like RADCOM’s offering increase understanding and provide a complete picture of each individual’s experience.
RADCOM’s Customer Experience solution provides telecom operators with deep insights into the customer experience, including service and application usage trends. It provides a customer experience index (CEI) for each service offering across multiple technologies, from voice to data. Its 360-degree view of the customer experience in one unified solution allows multiple stakeholders to enhance the customer experience, increase loyalty, upsell, and cross-sell services. With advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning, operators can understand the real experience even with encrypted data, saving time through anomaly detection, anticipating potential churners, and resolving issues quickly and efficiently.
The benefits to an AI/ML-driven assurance solution are numerous. From proactively identifying problems to gaining end-to-end customer experience visibility across networks, services, and devices. Operators can compare a subscriber CEI to a network baseline and correlate real-time subscriber analytics from RAN to edge to core. Furthermore, an automated assurance solution utilizes anomaly detection and predictive analytics to avoid customer-affecting issues.
Powering change
Times are changing. Operators need to adapt their approach, leveraging the full potential of new technologies to provide seamless connectivity and enhanced services to customers. As Silvia Candiani, VP of Microsoft Telco and Media Business, explained at the Mobile World Congress in February, “Telcos are number one, the center of digital systems of every single country.” It is not enough, though, just to fuel these new technologies. Telcos need to be the driver for digital service innovation too.
