April 2022 | Globe Teleservice

Do telecom companies have a customer experience problem

Telecom companies are facing a deluge of modern-day challenges: right from intense competition to the inability of their legacy infrastructure to keep up with the pace of disruption. While these challenges certainly impact the overall bottom line; another realm of the business that is constantly affected is customer experience.

With high-speed and high-quality communication services becoming a basic requirement – both in personal and professional spheres – telcos are increasingly finding it difficult to drive seamless customer experiences.

The CX challenges plaguing the telecom industry

The telecommunications industry has, traditionally, operated in a siloed manner, focusing only on a standard set of processes and technologies. But in today’s digital era, as new trends constantly enter the market, this must change. Telcos have to make substantial progress toward augmenting their network capacity to meet the constant demand for higher-speed networks. But this is easier said than done.

In 2022, and beyond, the industry will be confronted with new challenges (and opportunities) presented primarily by:

The dynamic regulatory and legislative environment that demands stringent regulations to be met
The constant emergence of new technological innovations like IoT, 5G, and edge that have to be embraced to drive value
An evolving competitive environment https://www.globeteleservices.com/iot-in-the-age-of-5g-opportunities-and-threats/where new-age, digitally-savvy players are mushrooming at an accelerated pace
The huge list of options consumers have in purchasing and consuming high-quality communication and internet services from wireless and satellite providers
The presence of siloed and rigid legacy systems that are not only difficult to operate but also difficult to manage, maintain, and integrate
The growing instances of mobile and cybersecurity attacks that require a thorough and detailed reassessment of security and risk management practices

These challenges directly (or indirectly) impact telcos’ ability to deliver an omnichannel customer experience – regardless of the device, network, or geography. At the same time, manual ways of operating the business and the over-reliance on proprietary systems make forecasting customer needs and delivering personalized services across the customer lifecycle a perennial challenge.

Solutions to focus on

As the digital age demands instant service gratification, consumers have extremely high expectations. Although customer service has always been critical to building and maintaining a competitive edge in the extremely crowded telecom market, with new norms and new economic conditions coming into play, the only way to sustain customer satisfaction and reduce churn is by meeting these expectations.

In today’s post-pandemic era, winning customer trust and loyalty is a totally different ball game, and depends entirely on the quality of service and level of satisfaction. As the pandemic accelerates the adoption of digital channels, seamless customer experiences have become vital. This is especially true as people work from their homes and require reliable service and support 24×7. At the same time, with autonomous vehicles, smart factories, and remote energy grids requiring top-notch, high-bandwidth communication services, it is time for telcos to move from being reactive to proactive. They must make sense of the billions of data points – to meet customer expectations of easy, fast, and first-time-right services.

Right from personalized offerings to efficient device management, quick customer service turnaround to high bandwidth connections – delivering unmatched customer experiences requires telcos to focus on the right solutions and platforms. Here are some tips:

Build a robust customer experience strategy: The first step in delivering seamless customer experiences is by building a robust customer experience strategy that takes into account consumption patterns. Understanding how consumers engage with telecom providers and how they consume services can help in charting out a plan for how and where they should be engaged for maximum satisfaction.
Invest in a modern customer data platform: Investing in a modern customer data platform that brings offline and online data from different sources into a unified location can aid in meeting telecom service expectations. Since all customer data is easily accessible, telcos can have a single and updated view of the customer journey and curate solutions and bundles that best meet their needs and preferences.
Enable seamless customer journeys: Constantly collecting customer data across the lifecycle and analysing it to offer the best products that match unique preferences is a great way to enable seamless customer journey experiences. Using this data, telcos can engage with customers in the most personalized manner and deliver services that are modern, relevant, and up-to-date.
Leverage AI innovations: Modern AI-based systems offer capabilities that can be leveraged to further optimize customer experiences. By measuring emotional and behavioural customer responses to product experiences, these systems can aid in turning emotions into actionable insights that can then be used by telcos to solve problems and drive better results.

In today’s digital era, it is not the number or variety of telecom services offered that matter; customer experience is gradually becoming the only competitive differentiator – as the demand for high-quality, high-speed internet connections surges. As telcos look to disrupt the extremely competitive marketplace, providing an exceptional customer experience across a variety of systems and customer touchpoints is a top business priority.

To deliver superior telecom customer experiences that aid in the consumption of more services, telcos must invest in the right solutions and platforms. This will not only help them in delivering services quickly but also in cross-selling and upselling new services – as and when they are launched. They can adjust to new trends, keep up with the pace of the competition, and continue to serve customers with the same speed and efficiency.

Why it’s Time for Telecom Companies to Modernize their Tech Strategy

Telecom companies have come a long way from the days when they provided basic telephony services. This sector is now a ~$1.5 trillion market that makes all communication possible. This sector is now providing internet services, mobile enablement, and network services and fulfilling the soaring demand for digital services. As customer demands evolve, this sector has to evolve and embrace new technologies too. It must modernize its tech strategy to leverage the multiple opportunities in the market and improve profitability while innovating to deliver greater value to consumers and businesses.

Telecom companies have identified the need for digital transformation to drive competitiveness in today’s complex business environment. However, legacy technology is severely impeding their capacity to pursue a digital-centric future with 70% of telcos struggling to integrate digital channels while others express concern over data security, short-term profit loss, and poor customer experience.

Updating legacy technology makes sense because telcos now must:

Leverage new, cutting-edge technologies to drive competitive differentiation

Giving legacy technology an overhaul is essential to drive competitive differentiation in a cut-throat business environment. Technologies such as AI, M2M, and big data have the potential to disrupt the telecom landscape and enable those operating in this space to improve their business opportunities, increase their customer base, and improve brand recognition opportunities in the face of rising competition from OTT platforms.

While a complete overhaul of the legacy systems might seem improbable at first, building a strategy that enables the gradual adoption of these technologies through applications and processes is a good starting point.

Identify new revenue streams

Increasing competitiveness demands telecom providers proactively identify and capitalize on new revenue streams. At the same time, it is equally important to identify and plug revenue leaks. Legacy technologies and systems are usually siloed and fail to provide a comprehensive 365-degree view of all revenue interactions.

Modern-day technology applications come to the rescue here and provide comprehensive, data-backed insights into performance, areas of improvement, and new revenue streams. This becomes essential since MVNOs are facing stiff competition not only amongst themselves but also from the rising proliferation of OTT providers.

Elevate customer experience

Driving elevated customer experience is another frontier to conquer for telecom operators be it by improving service and driving personalization or making the right product or service offerings.

Modern-day technologies, for example, can help telecom operators upsurge their revenues on SMPP Bulk Messaging, reduce operational costs, and enhance the customer experience. Using the right technology infrastructure, telcos can also elevate enterprise customer experiences by ensuring that the business connects with the customer more seamlessly.

Offering capabilities such as 5G, robust A2P messaging, or enabling RICH messaging also needs a technology upgrade as legacy technologies are not capable of handling the demands of these services.

Drive security and compliance

Given the increasingly complex regulatory and compliance landscape, telecom providers need to drive greater data security. That apart, telecom companies must also work towards improving their security posture to address grey routes and making the network safe as enterprises move towards hybrid work and mobile payments adoption accelerates.

Legacy networks and tech stacks are now unsuited to meet the needs of an expanding threat landscape. Network security attacks, for example, have been a point of concern and remain so in the face of rising cybersecurity threats. Network virtualization is in fact, imperative to thrive in today’s threat landscape to allow operators network slicing to separate network resources and guarantee greater security.

Proactive route testing, home routing, and re-routing capabilities are also essential to improve the security posture. It helps operators analyze the information exchange between two parties and identify discrepancies that reveal suspect routes and direct proactive attention to the same.

Address enterprise needs proactively

Enterprise needs are changing as the world of work continues to experience constant disruption. Digital transformation for telecom operators thus becomes non-negotiable if they want to improve their topline and fulfil the demands of the new normal.

Telecom companies now need to address enterprise unified communication needs along with the usual suspects of connectivity and messaging and develop their capabilities to provide greater customization across services.

Whether it is enabling e-KYC, improving security, providing customized billing, etc.- they need new technologies such as AI and ensure that their IT systems can adapt to the changing needs. Legacy technologies and systems, given their monolithic nature, make it harder to drive agility in today’s fast-paced business environment.

Telecom companies need to identify how they will integrate with legacy technologies to leverage the advantages that new technologies and digital transformation offer. Telecom companies have experienced the greatest challenge in a generation where they have to keep businesses and individuals connected while meeting unprecedented demand for connectivity. Moving along the path of digital transformation and updating the legacy stack is the only way forward.

The Massive Enterprise Opportunity For The Telecom Sector

The telecom industry has historically been focused on individual consumers who consume a bunch of services including voice, video, Internet, and other communication services. But almost every telecom company now finds the B2C market saturated, with little or no scope for differentiation or driving long-term innovation. The current challenges of the B2C market are a great driver to turn towards the B2B landscape to target large-scale enterprise customers to capture a bigger market share and achieve higher revenue.

The enterprise opportunity

Most global telecommunication carriers are largely focused on capturing growth in the consumer segment. But increasingly saturating mobile markets, the constant disruption from OTT providers, and growing price wars have put the B2C market under immense pressure.

Although large enterprise customers already have established, long-term contracts with Cisco, AT&T, Dell, and others for wired connectivity and Microsoft, AWS, Google, and others for cloud connectivity, there is sufficient room for a telecom service provider to provide the backbone for these solutions. This is in addition to the increasing demand for robust connectivity by the small and medium enterprise clients that presents a massive growth opportunity for telecom providers. This is especially evident in today’s post-pandemic age, where almost every business is looking to go digital.

But it’s not just higher growth rates that are enticing; along with growth, telcos also stand the chance of improving their profit margins, especially as digitally-savvy, new-age companies are willing to pay more for modern and differentiated services. As data services act as the foundation on which a broader Information and Communications Technology portfolio can be built, they present a great starting point for telcos to venture into the B2B world via the delivery of Managed, IoT, and unified communications and security services.

The benefits for enterprise customers

In the extremely crowded and competitive telecom market, enterprise customers offer a huge opportunity to drive business-wide transformation. As revenues across the B2C segment slowly stagnate, the B2B market acts as a treasure trove of opportunities, especially in today’s age of hybrid work.

As a massive number of enterprises across the world now leverage the hybrid workplace model to run their business, they find themselves struggling to keep up with the pace of modernization. The presence of outdated legacy systems and siloed tools restrict them from efficiently running their operations, while also hampering the experience employees and customers have with the business.

Although telecom providers have always been laser-focused on consumers to grow revenue through individual and residential services, as the pressure to digitalize intensifies post-pandemic, telecom companies can drive exceptional growth and success by targeting the enterprise customer, allowing them to:

Re-architect, refactor or replace complex legacy communications networks and systems
Move away from wired networks toward more efficient and scalable wireless options
Reduce the cost and complexity of managing rigid systems and bring innovations into the market
Enhance the ability of the enterprise network to combat threats while protecting the business, employees, and customers from cyberattacks
Improve the speed and efficiency with which enterprises within the business as well as with customers and partners
Meet service delivery requests in a way that best meets end-user expectations

The benefits for telcos

Telcos seeking to establish direct and strong relationships with enterprise customers have several reasons to now venture into the B2B market to sell modern and innovative services and fundamentally disrupt existing offerings. Leveraging agile and digital savvy tools can aid in creating new kinds of customer-centric solutions and bring them to market at an unprecedented pace.

Migrating to the B2B space is not only a good way to expand the footprint and enhance digital connectivity; it is also becoming a crucial element of business strategy and operations. Here are 3 reasons why it’s time for telecom companies to leverage the massive enterprise opportunity:

Drive innovation across industries: Unlike with individual customers where opportunities for innovation and scalability are limited, with enterprise customers, telcos can drive innovation that scales across industries. Telcos that capitalize on trends like 5G can enable manufacturers to more efficiently support critical applications, energy companies to remotely monitor their grids, healthcare agencies to deliver intelligent healthcare, and more. Other options include seamlessly bringing together M2M, Big Data, and AI to create a new world of business messaging. The ability to scale innovation across industries is a great way to seamlessly expand its footprint in the B2B space and boost revenue.
Exploit the as-a-service model: With the demand for SaaS-based offerings constantly surging, the enterprise market offers a great chance for telecom companies to keep up with the demand. As companies across manufacturing, retail, education etc. seek greater connectivity, speed, and efficiency, the as-a-service model is a great way to deliver top-notch cloud, IoT, edge computing, Unified Communications, and other advanced communications services to take the business to the next level.
Offer better platforms and bundles: The enterprise market also allows telecom companies to enhance their reach through the delivery of better platforms and bundles. For instance, telecom companies that offer connectivity services to a car manufacturer can also provide bundled services for consumers’ personal devices such as their phones and tablets. These bundled services can not only improve compatibility; they can also streamline the end-user experience.

For an industry that has largely targeted only individual consumers, the enterprise market offers a great opportunity for telcos to expand market share, reach new customers, and drive higher revenue. Although the concept is relatively new, prioritizing digital connectivity to conduct business operations should be a top priority for telecom companies in the coming years, especially as robust connectivity infrastructure has now become the backbone for smooth, resilient, and efficient business execution. Moving to the enterprise can not only aid in maximizing profits; it can also empower telcos to capture the low-hanging fruit and build a framework for continuous evolution and transformation.