Although it may not seem relevant in 2024, the telecommunications (telco) sector emerged relatively unscathed from the global pandemic. For instance, while European GDP shrank by almost 8% in 2020, the telco sector contracted by just 2% as businesses turned to telco providers to meet the challenge of remote working practices head-on. 

Four years later, new threats to the telco sector are emerging. From AI to cyber security, net neutrality to carbon zero, the industry has to react fast to ensure that the telco sector remains robust. With such a focus on meeting these challenges and embracing change, how can telecom providers enhance their customer experience (CX) offerings this year and beyond? 

Customer expectations have shifted enormously since the pandemic, with more businesses than ever before embracing hybrid and remote working. With that in mind, this article examines how your organisation can move with the times and enhance your company’s CX to reach new heights. 

CX in Telco: How Things Currently Stand 

The telco industry continues to evolve rapidly, meeting the maturing needs of customers worldwide as they change. While the global pandemic accelerated the rate of change by enabling new ways of working, that pace hasn’t slowed down as businesses seek more effective ways of communicating across remote teams, often across international borders. 

The adoption of AI has played a significant role in CX within the Telco industry. A recent survey from NVIDIA found that only 10% of respondents weren’t currently using AI. 56% agreed that AI is critical to their future business success. 

The same study found that almost half (48%) chose enhancing the customer experience as the most significant opportunity with AI. That number rose to 57% for respondents identifying generative AI as a critical factor in improving CX and 35% identifying CX as their biggest AI success story.

Meanwhile, Slalom reported that 70% of executives will increase resources for AI investments in 2024, with automation as a key driver. As we’ll see, AI will likely play a critical role in CX through realistic customer interactions. 

In addition, the cybersecurity threat recently came to the fore within the telco sector with the CrowdStrike and Microsoft outage that caused global chaos. 

Indeed, with Microsoft playing such a key role in enabling global telecommunications, the knock-on effect was seismic for telco customers worldwide. While cybersecurity has been a long-standing threat, this recent fiasco offers opportunities for telco suppliers to take the lead with new, cutting-edge security features to reassure customers and enhance CX. 

How to Enhance Customer Experience in Telco 

Offering excellent CX is paramount to keeping your existing client base engaged and helping to grow your business. While easily overlooked, there are several strategies you can use to enhance your CX within the telco sector. 

Let’s look at some of the best:

Customer Feedback Management 

Definitely putting this in the first priority. Your customers will always have something to say about your products and services, whether positive or negative. Telcos are no different from businesses in other industries in that they face the problem of collecting customer feedback across several channels. 

How your business responds to feedback is one of the main factors on which your CX is judged. However, customers often provide all their input in a single place, meaning some comments around pricing, for example, may be routed to the software department. 

Managing your customer feedback routes to ensure the correct feedback reaches the right department is critical. Not only does that ensure your customers feel engaged, but it also helps your business improve by addressing potential problems before they become issues that impact your operations. 

Targeted customer feedback surveys that address single areas of concern are an excellent way to keep feedback focused on a specific area rather than capturing generic comments about the whole business. This also allows you to gain more granular and refined insights around CX, making it much easier to produce actions to improve CX. 

In addition, using an omnichannel customer feedback approach makes it easier than ever to capture customer feedback. Rather than delaying customers in the store, telco businesses can send surveys via smartphones, desktops, mobile apps, and social media to capture customer sentiment. This reduces the inconvenience for customers, allowing them to give feedback at the click of a button while broadening the data your telco captures to make informed decisions. 

Offer a Personalised and Customer-focused Approach

Building an emotional bond with your customers and your brand is critical to your business.

This is as true in telco as in any other industry. Making your customers feel special by keeping their experience at the center of your offering and personalising your service to meet their needs will make them feel valued. 

Cultivating an engaged audience means that word will spread about the positive CX you offer, and that will attract new customers to your business. Measure the success of your efforts with metrics like a net promotor score (NPS) that gives you insight into how likely your existing customers are to recommend your products and services to their peers. 

Embrace New Technologies and AI 

Telco customers are no longer happy to be held on a telephone line for hours, listening to elevator music as they’re redirected from human handler to human handler to resolve their questions and queries. Indeed, many people now know the lyrics to ‘Hello’ by Adele while waiting for calls to be transferred. Businesses embracing new technologies and AI solutions to enhance CX are seeing increased customer retention and profitability. 

So, as customers are increasingly happy with the use of AI in customer feedback management, telco businesses have a massive opportunity to gain a competitive edge. With natural language processing algorithms capturing customer sentiment and AI cutting out the likelihood of human error creeping in, AI also offers the opportunity to improve consistency and efficiency with automated data processing capabilities that provide deeper insights into CX than ever. 

In addition, machine learning can analyse customer behavior patterns, expectations, pain points, and preferences to find trends and feed into personalising the customer experience through product recommendations, personalised greetings, and proactively anticipating their needs. 

What Can Telco Learn from Other Industries to Enhance CX?

Learning best practices from businesses that have successfully boosted CX in other industries can help telcos gain an edge in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Staying ahead of the pack and offering customers more than the competition increases your brand’s reputation, boosts loyalty, and increases the number of customers advocating for your brand. 

For example, in Finland, Elisa has automated over 280 processes using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), resulting in over 3.6 million transactions processed by robots in 2019 alone, and over €2 million saved through billing automations. In addition, Elisa uses NLP to handle emails and direct them to the right departments leading to reduced customer waiting times. 

One area many telcos have struggled with is standing out from the crowd. Their audiences see supplier offerings as similar, lacking a diverse range of products, prices, and customer services. As a result, telco businesses must think differently and pitch their offerings in a way that captures the customer’s attention. 

This can most often be achieved by adopting best practices from other business sectors and creating new initiatives that move them ahead of the competition. 

Going Slow Can Win A Race

The common mistake and temptation in the industry is to run before you can walk and release new products rapidly to stay ahead of the curve. However, that approach comes with a massive layer of risk. 

Launching new tech products involves getting several moving parts working simultaneously. Bringing a new advance to the market before it’s ready to launch can be counterproductive. Customer expectations will be sky-high, and if a product has bugs or doesn’t deliver the promised functionality, it will damage the business reputation. 

The gaming industry is particularly good at managing expectations by asking customers and gamers to beta-test new games before launching them. This allows developers to identify what works well and what needs to be amended before the game drops. 

By adopting a calculated approach and gathering customer sentiment about new products before release, telco businesses can manage customers’ expectations, build anticipation, and ultimately exceed customer expectations by releasing a product that eats into their competitor’s market share.

Granular Insights are Valuable

Telcos are traditionally good at gaining customer feedback yet poor at turning insights into action to enhance CX. Meanwhile, retail businesses are excellent at capturing comments from their clientele and turning that data into tangible actions that build loyalty. 

Taking the lead from retail businesses and using data to understand their customers’ needs, sentiments, and pressure points can manifest improved retention rates and turn detractors into neutral people and neutral people into advocates for your brand. 

For instance, retail companies analyse customer behavior in massive detail to understand everyone’s habits, interests and buying patterns to create personalised product recommendations. 

In addition, retail businesses are excellent at creating customer loyalty, reward, and referral schemes that foster an emotional bond between brand and customer. Customers are rewarded with discounts and exclusive offers by remaining faithful to that retailer. Meanwhile, the most trusted financial services providers offer inducements to onboard new customers, whether a referral fee or a payment for switching providers. 

While telcos can set up metrics, such as NPS and customer satisfaction (CSAT), to measure whether CX is improving, creating tangible initiatives to reward their most engaged customers could produce outstanding results. 

The Power of Marketing Opt-ins 

GDPR laws have shifted the power of marketing opt-ins into customers’ hands. This makes it more difficult for telcos to proactively engage with a broader audience base and turn one-off customers into recurring clients. 

This means telcos must work much harder to understand what their potential customers care about and create high-quality marketing content that resonates with them. 

Content should be short, interesting, and have a compelling hook that engages the audience. Telcos must entice customers to take the next step with a persuasive call to action and by offering value, whether with an amusing, memorable tagline or a solution to a specific problem. 

Value doesn’t necessarily mean offering discounts or special offers. Giving customers a chance to engage with their brand through regular newsletters, a short, targeted survey asking for their opinion on products, services, or their needs, or inviting them to be part of a customer-research panel creates mutual value. Your customers feel engaged and heard while you benefit from in-depth insights to help you boost profitability. 

Personalisation can be a big part of this, through birthday greetings or special offers on special occasions rewarding their loyalty. 

Stay Customer-focused

Many consumers have a relatively dim view of telcos. From lengthy lock-in periods that many see as predatory and poor customer service, often with unresponsive customer care lines and inadequate troubleshooting, customers frequently complain about the telco CX. 

Many telcos lock customers in for a 12-month minimum period. While this suggests telcos have an opportunity to build loyalty, customers sometimes feel held hostage while the telco benefits from the assurance of a 12-month turnover. 

Prioritising customer engagement means removing any friction points throughout the customer journey, making it as seamless as possible for them to receive updates, ask questions and share feedback.

– Andrés Irlando, President & COO at Zayo Group

However, many other industries offer a cooling-off period of 14 to 30 days, during which customers can cancel their service or return products without penalty. Alternatively, the lock-in period for service subscriptions might be monthly, quarterly, or 6-monthly, offering customers greater flexibility should their requirements change. 

While this approach might appear risky for a telco business, it allows them to improve CX and ensure customers want to renew. Indeed, offering a positive CX might lead customers to sign up for longer-period subscriptions. 

Similarly, offering customers the opportunity to change their subscription plans without penalty or admin fees builds significant goodwill and can help position a telco ahead of its competition when it comes to existing customers advocating for it. 

What Emerging Technologies Can Enhance Telco CX, And What Is Their Impact?

Telecom businesses that adopt emerging technologies to enhance their CX can transform how they interact with customers. Traditionally, telcos have reactively intervened to improve CX. However, the emergence of generative AI tech means that telcos can proactively engage with customers and elevate CX to new heights. 

Here are some emerging technologies that telco businesses can adopt to enhance their CX: 

Voice Assistance and Chatbots

82% of companies agree that failing to add voice interaction capabilities to their products will result in losing market share. Meanwhile, 51% have already reduced voice assistants to reduce customer service resolution time, while 87% believe using voice assistant technology will realise business value within a year of deployment. 

Customers are becoming much more trusting of voice assistance technology, whether through natural language processing that recognises verbal queries and routes them to resolution or voice bots that proactively interact with customers. 

Similarly, pre-programmed AI-powered chatbots allow customers to interact in real-time with a business without spending hours on the phone. Chatbots can resolve common queries in a fraction of the time, reducing human time spent on customer service and boosting the customer experience. 

While voice assistance and generative AI chatbots are still far from perfect, they have developed at such a pace that they are more intuitive and powerful than a year ago. And with businesses investing enormous sums into developing voice assistance tools and AI chatbots, that speed of development isn’t likely to slow down in the coming years. 

Data Analytics

Businesses have access to more data than ever before. Turning this knowledge into actionable insights that boost CX is vital to telcos’ gaining a competitive edge and staying ahead of the market. 

Investing in advanced analytics has several benefits. By identifying customers who might report specific issues, operating models can be shifted to resolve problems as they arise. This proactive approach means many issues are resolved before customers become aware of them, and, in some cases, they reach out to customers before they call to report an outage or service disruption.

For example, Telia, one of the leading telecom in the Nordics, increased CSAT by 30%, generated additional revenue, and established a customer-centric culture with the help of Lumoa, a customer experience analytics platform. See how Telia did it.

We had issues with one of our user groups. With Lumoa, we got a more exact understanding of what we needed to work on. Improving the speed of our product had a significant impact on that user group’s sales.

– Kalle Micklin, Product Owner

By predicting customer behaviors, telcos can build customer trust and find efficiencies and savings while helping customers feel valued. For instance, if your telco offers mobile services, offering customers multiple warnings about data over-usage along with help on reducing consumption and offering upgrade packages helps customers make informed decisions about their behaviors. 

How to Implement Your CX Improvement Strategies 

Now you know what to implement to help boost CX, but how do you do it? One of the most effective ways is to deploy a fully integrated customer feedback management system, such as Netigate. 

The feedback solution allows you to set up customer surveys within minutes to gain insights into how your customers feel about your brand and their overall experience. The data from these surveys can then be translated into actionable insights that can be measured and tracked through the CX solution. 

This allows you to see the impact of any changes you implement on CX metrics, such as CSAT and NPS, and make any further adjustments to ensure your customers feel valued and heard and give them the best possible experience with your brand. 

The Final Word 

Meeting your customers’ needs and providing them with an unbeatable experience is a surefire way to take your business to the next level. With so many telco customers experiencing underwhelming levels of customer satisfaction, taking steps to boost your CX can help you become a market leader. 

Embracing new technologies such as generative AI and data analytics, providing a personalised service that meets customers’ needs, and keeping customers at the focus of every part of your telco business will elevate your CX above your competition, boosting customer retention, onboarding new customers, and increasing profitability. 

Enhancing CX may not be easy, but it’s worth the investment in the long run. Find out how we can help you.