Over the past year, telcos have been up against an acceleration of digital adoption that’s been shaking up our industry over the past decade. The pace of change we’ve seen has only amplified underlying customer experience (CX) challenges, with leading brands in the sector surging ahead, widening the gap between innovators and followers.
And all of this is unfolding when customer loyalty is being stretched to the limit and tested at new levels as nearly all consumers — 75% in the U.S. — have reported trying out new shopping behaviors due to economic concerns, store closures, and evolving priorities resulting from the pandemic.
The question is: How are select brands gaining an advantage, while others are struggling?
The answer: Top telecom leaders are investing in customer experience, and they’re leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to adapt and innovate in lockstep with changing customer needs and expectations — with agility.
Gartner predicts that within the next year nearly three out of four customer interactions will be executed using emerging technologies like AI and machine learning — up from 15% just three years ago.
Within the telecom industry, we’re seeing pioneers use the power of AI in the following three key ways to uncover what really matters, who needs attention, and what strategic actions can be taken to optimize the customer experience.
1. Identifying points of friction across the entire customer journey — and prioritizing improvements that will have the greatest impact
With cost efficiency and customer-centricity both top of mind for telcos, having a laser-focused approach to allocating capital and resources in support of CX initiatives and strategies and ensuring these approaches truly align with elevating the overall CX are all the more important.
That’s why using AI-powered technologies to analyze customer feedback is increasingly becoming the tool of choice for brands looking to identify friction across the entire customer journey and prioritize actions that can be taken to have the biggest impact on customer experiences and loyalty.
Your company’s interactions with customers across social media, third-party review websites, support calls, chat, text, email, surveys and more are your greatest source of truth. These data sources are being mined by telcos to discover customer pain points, empowering brands to focus their efforts and achieve the greatest impact, faster.
Whether it’s detecting knowledge gaps among your company’s customer support team to guide future training initiatives, or fixing a single line of code to address a small website error that’s behind countless calls, digitization is a key priority for telcos. AI can inform digital investment roadmaps to make sure you’re investing in areas most important to customers on their digital journey.
That’s been the case for Liberty Global, a large international telecom provider that uses AI-powered text analytics to focus its improvement efforts and capital investment in high-impact areas, and track the impact of those changes over time. AI has helped them identify that service reliability is a driver of customer loyalty. This key learning guided leaders to prioritize investing in WiFi infrastructure, a move that’s helped Liberty Global improve the overall customer experience and deliver positive ROI.
2. Connecting with customers on a deeper, emotional level and personalizing 1:1 interactions, at scale
The most effective brands listen and connect with customers on an individual level. They are human and empathetic; and they rely on AI.
Right at this very moment your customers are telling you what they love, what they hate, and what problems they want you to solve. By using AI, you can dig into the emotional context of every conversation, understand your customers at a deeper level, determine critical touchpoints of the customer journey, and correct issues in real-time.
With telcos operating in a highly competitive market with shrinking margins, there’s an urgent need to personalize interactions, especially as generational shifts and effects of the pandemic drive digital-only interactions.
3. Understanding who customers are and what they need, in real time — and prevent churn
What drives changes in loyalty? Which behaviors are warning signs of churn? Who are your at-risk customers and what can you do to retain them?
By applying artificial intelligence techniques to mine insights across billions of unique customer journeys and sift through millions of customer comments, your company can answer these very questions and make real-time decisions that positively affect both customer experience and your financial results.
AI helps us not only understand current customer sentiment and loyalty, but can also predict future customer behavior and pinpoint future friction points. This is particularly powerful for retaining and engaging customers.
By combining what you know about your customers, from their spend history to the actions they’re taking in real time, you can segment customers more effectively. Doing so will help you provide solutions for detractors and take advantage of opportunities to activate promoters.
Even among brand advocates, nearly 20% say poor customer experiences have the power to greatly impact their loyalty, and nearly 60% say they’ll switch brands if they can get the same product or service with a company offering a superior experience.
When you consider that one bad experience has the potential to ruin customer relationships, missing these key signals is no longer an option.
As customer experience initiatives move to the forefront of telco strategies, AI is increasingly becoming an important tool to amplify key operations with customers. With AI-based initiatives, telcos can foster stronger relationships and drive loyalty with users who may have changing needs and expectations throughout their journeys. This is especially important now, as many facets of daily life are evolving. Through AI, telcos can prioritize customer needs with ease and flexibility while maintaining a competitive advantage over businesses that have yet to embrace this type of digital transformation.
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