Month: June 2022

Building Relationships with Customers Across Channels

Most companies understand that customer satisfaction is key to long-term sustainability and growth. But delighting customers in today’s digital era requires you to constantly seek their feedback and learn how you can further enhance the experiences they have across channels and touchpoints. Read on as we discuss how you can build customer relationships across channels.

The Growth of Omnichannel Communication

Offering a compelling omnichannel experience was once a competitive differentiator for brands. Today, it has become a mandate for survival. The main driver for this has been the sudden and widespread growth of the e-commerce industry, with the global market expected to total $5.55 trillion in 2022.

As more and more customers across the world use a variety of channels, such as websites and mobile apps (even brick-and-mortar stores and shops), they expect brands to offer seamless communication experiences across each of these channels.

Successful omnichannel communication requires organizations to map individual customer journeys by determining the channels they use, the touchpoints they engage with and the experiences they encounter. And then, they need to create a seamless experience that allows customers to flow from one channel to another seamlessly. But this entails redefining the way brands communicate with their customers.

The Challenges of Building Sustained and Consistent Customer Relationships

Although omnichannel communication is a critical component of business success, the challenges of building sustained and consistent customer relationships are many:

  • Getting a single view of customers: As businesses get increasingly global, customers are spread across different regions and territories. This causes a big challenge for organizations as they cannot get a single view of customers across different locations and channels – mainly because different teams use different systems and approaches for customer communication.
  • Quickly responding to customer requests: Today’s customers expect organizations to respond to their requests/demands in real-time and resolve their issues within a few hours. But with customers using different devices and channels, ensuring each customer is attended to via a channel and in a language they’re most comfortable with isn’t easy.
  • Integrating interaction data from different sources: Combining different interaction channels and converting them to one holistic customer journey requires combining data from diverse sources. More often than not, the data formats are as varied as the number of channels and stored in siloed systems that poorly integrate with other systems.
  • Delivering seamless journeys: Offering an omnichannel customer experience that seamlessly weaves through different interaction channels is another hurdle that organizations have to cross to boost customer response rates. Brands must be available across different devices and platforms to ensure the different touchpoints are connected, so customers can advance through the entire customer journey without interruptions, dropping off or picking up from anywhere, at any time, and on any device.
How an Intelligent Omnichannel Solution Can Change That

An intelligent omnichannel solution can help organizations understand customer needs and take steps to improve customer experience. Investing in such a solution can allow companies to reduce the cost-to-service, limit churn, and increase customer value.

Using comprehensive analytics, a modern platform can collect insights that matter the most in the customer journey and empower organizations to act on these insights and improve the products, services, and experiences they offer customers. Here’s how:

  • Reach customers across channels: An intelligent omnichannel solution can measure customer experience across channels, including website, POS, email, mobile app, and more. It can pick up conversations from one channel and continue them across others, delivering a seamless omnichannel experience to customers across various touchpoints.
  • Get in-depth actionable insights: Using an advanced solution, enterprises can unearth actionable insights and capture real-time customer emotions. Modern and intuitive dashboards can provide necessary insights into customer concerns and needs while presenting ideas and suggestions to improve customer experience.
  • Respond in real-time: A modern solution can enable enterprises to respond to customers in real-time. The minute a customer interacts at a touchpoint, they can converse with them in their preferred language to boost satisfaction and response rate. Since a modern solution uses an interactive conversational UI, companies can reduce drop-offs and maintain their CSAT scores.
  • Measure customer feedback:Via Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES), an intelligent omnichannel solution can aid in measuring customer satisfaction, evaluating the likelihood of customers recommending the brand, determining the level of customer service quality, and more.
  • Resolve customer queries quickly:A unified communication solution can help categorize, assign and track issues and take them to closure. Via an integrated action module, enterprises can respond to customer queries instantly and resolve them with the expected speed and quality.
Conclusion

Organizations need to provide seamless and consistent experiences across all communication channels to convert customers into die-hard brand advocates. So, it’s only natural to invest in an intelligent omnichannel solution to reach customers across channels, get in-depth, actionable insights, respond to them in real time, and measure customer feedback to improve their overall experience. Let us show you how telecom brands around the world have enabled new opportunities by tapping the omnichannel needs of their customers and users.

 

The various aspects a call anti-fraud solution must cover

Security breaches and fraud are not new in the telecom industry. As technology gets sophisticated, hackers and fraudsters too get smarter. They are on the constant lookout for vulnerabilities and are relentless in testing firewalls for cracks and weaknesses. Scammers and fraudsters attack, take their profits, and leave before they can be stopped.

In 2021, total global telecom revenues stood at approximately USD 1.8 Trillion. But the amount of telecom revenue loss due to fraud stood at $39.89 Billion. Fraud losses increased by 28% or approximately USD 11.6 Billion between 2019 and 2021.

Voice fraud is one of the top inter-carrier fraud cases. Voice fraud burdens subscribers with huge bills and affects MNOs and their residential and commercial subscribers. Some of the common types of voice fraud are IRSF (International Revenue Share Fraud), False Answer Supervision (FAS), Number Hijacking, Interconnect bypass, and Roaming Fraud. Call Forwarding Fraud, Wangiri fraud (a Japanese term for one (ring) and cut), SIM Box fraud, and PBX hacking are some of the other kinds of voice fraud that are making the chamber of horrors for telecom operators.

IRSF (International Revenue Share Fraud)

IRSF fraud assumes a backdoor revenue-sharing agreement between an IPRS or a communications provider. The fraudster manipulates the telephone service and receives compensation for the traffic. IRSF fraud generates anything between $4 and $6.1 billion in damages.

Standard monitoring solutions fail to identify this kind of fraud easily as it is very hard to sift through large volumes of daily traffic to identify anomalies.

False Answer Supervision (FAS)

False Answer Supervision (FAS) can be of two types. The first kind is the Early Answer fraud where a call connection takes place before the subscriber answers the phone. The second kind is the Late Disconnect fraud where the call remains active and the billing clocks even after the subscriber hangs up.

Number hijacking is also another kind of FAS fraud. Here the fraudulent operator keeps the customer waiting for the connections for as long as possible or until the maximum call timer runs out.

Interconnect bypass or SIM Boxing

Interconnect bypass fraud allows fraudulent operators to profit from the spread between low retail prices for on-net and off-net calls and higher international interconnect rates. This fraud enables the unauthorized insertion of traffic onto another carrier’s network. It is also called SIM Boxing.

The fraudulent party replaces the expensive international interconnect with a cheaper, practically free, routing channel and pinches the difference.

Wangari Fraud

Wangari fraud is a call-back scam. Wangari is a Japanese term that means one ring and cut. The fraudsters give a missed call to unsuspecting subscribers to call back to fraudulent premium numbers. CSPs incur direct and indirect losses because of Wangari fraud.

However, the lack of timely threat intelligence and the lack of a platform to exchange data in real-time impede operator capabilities to identify Wangari Fraud proactively.

PBX hacking

PBX and VoIP hacking is when fraudsters hack into telecom networks and pump up significant traffic levels for an IPRS. PBX hacking is a common and well-known form of telecom fraud and can lead to enormous revenue losses. According to the Communications Fraud Control Association (CFCA), in 2019 PBX hacking was the number 1 telecom fraud method, causing a global fraud loss of $3.64 billion.

CDR-based anti-fraud systems cannot break active calls and hence are not well-suited to prevent PBX hacking. They also perform poorly with traffic disguised with statistical patterns. PBX attacks can last for hours and go undetected in the absence of the right anti-fraud systems.

Grey Calls

Grey routes have been giving telecom operators sleepless nights for decades. Grey calling routes bypass licensed carriers by terminating international calls onto domestic telecom networks using unlicensed and illegal telecom setups.

The illegal operators host their equipment at places where their calls can reach multiple cell sites for the calls to get widely dispersed. They also employ multiple SIM boxes, rotate SIM cards, manipulate calling patterns, etc. to outfox traditional fraud detection systems.

SIM Box fraud is illegal since the operators running these setups do not have the required government licenses. These networks not only lead to huge revenue losses but can also impact national security because these routes can be easily exploited by terrorists and anti-national elements.

The solution

Traditional fraud detection systems often do not provide the depth of scanning needed to combat the growing sophistication of telecom hackers and fraudulent agents. Telcos now need to be able to proactively prevent potential fraud by developing their capability to identify suspicious inbound and outbound traffic streams based on behavioural patterns and anomalous traffic.

Fraud detection systems that use technologies such as AI and ML make the telecom security perimeter more airtight. AI-ML-powered detection systems help detect fraud calls in real-time based on various parameters.

Parameters such as behavioural analysis (from a single Calling Line Identification), call volume, the time gap between two calls, number length, adjacent number checking, call distribution working and after working hours, and the number of unique destination numbers in a given period and consecutive attempt gap of a failed call attempt are some such areas to configure.

The right anti-fraud solution leverages machine learning algorithms for faster and proactive anomaly detection and navigating challenges like Interconnect bypass or SIM Boxing.

These solutions protect the subscribers from fraud, quality fluctuation, and surprise bills and can be fully configurable to meet specific business needs. AI and Machine Learning algorithms make proactive and continuous scanning of traffic routes possible and easily point to anomalous traffic.

In Conclusion

Voice fraud has been and shall continue to remain a lucrative criminal activity. As technologies advance, so does hacker and fraudster sophistication. A comprehensive anti-fraud detection system thus emerges as a critical investment to secure networks and revenue. By strengthening the security perimeter and establishing powerful firewalls driven by AI and ML, telecom providers can minimize fraud risks and prevent revenue and reputation leaks. Talk to us to see how to win against the fraudsters.

 

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