Undoubtedly, the quality of customer service provided by telcos needs an upgrade. An old saying goes: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." Unfortunately, the quality of customer service offered in the telecom industry is already broken and ineffective. Therefore, it definitely needs a fix. Anyone who has called their telecom provider to get an issue resolved will agree to this.
What is the core problem? Why is one of the largest industries in the world not offering the best-in-class customer service to their customers? While delivering hyper-personalized and superior customer experiences is no longer a choice but mandatory for any business to gain a competitive edge, why are the telcos not ready to jump on the bandwagon?
Since the dawn of the telecom industry, the customer service model is the same. The model takes the customer's issues into account and looks for a resolution. However, the model does not take customer experience or customer journey into account. It lacks a human touch. That is a gap telos should bridge. Many telco customers are frustrated after going through the customer service process—on the phone or in person. This brings us back to the obvious yet crucial questions: Why do we follow this model, and why isn't it changed yet?
For many businesses, the cost is simply too much to incur. Their focus has always been on reducing costs, as a result, their customer service has been sub-standard, leading to the loss of both customers and brand reputation. Even in scenarios where businesses do not have to worry about market share or profitability, they still do not allocate the required budget towards customer service or customer retention; they focus on revenue-generating initiatives for higher revenues. Nevertheless, customer service is evolving, and it’s evolving rapidly.
We are already witnessing an evolution in customer service. It is time to rethink and redefine customer service. The following interesting facts will help us understand the gravity of this situation:
- According to Forrester's Customer Experience Index (CX Index™), even an increase of 1 point in the CX index would result in a $3.39 increment in the Average Revenue Per Unit (ARPU) for the highly competitive telecom industry that is grappling with customer experience.
- It is observed that around 60% of telecom consumers bypass the IVR if the interaction is poor in terms of wait time, navigation, complex menus, etc. 83% of the consumers avoid interacting with their telecom companies, thus resulting in customer churn.
- Poor customer service is the top reason consumers in America cancel contracts across various services like wireless, internet, TV/cable, etc. Consumers often pardon the one-off service crisis or outage that generally occurs, but recurring below-par experiences are not tolerated.
- The telecom industry sees a surge in increased integration of self-care apps and social media with their customer service. However, it accounts for only a small fraction of their overall interactions.
After understanding the gravity of the situation, it is clear that contact centers should prioritize operational efficiency and provide superior customer experiences. While the former directly help save redundant human effort and creates more efficient systems, the latter helps retain customers, gain new customers, and strengthen customer relationships in the long run.
Problem
Telecom customers are highly sensitive towards the quality of service. Moreover, the industry suffers from having one of the lowest customer service ratings across all industries.
As per the NPS Benchmark Report, telecom companies score very low in the average industry ratings.
High demands from customers are also causing friction between the promises made by the telecom companies and the services they deliver. This leads to a drop in customer satisfaction and seamless interaction levels.
Today's younger generation does not want to visit the stores to be served, and telecom companies need to rethink their customer service approach to serve this segment of customers. The path to better customer service is improving customer experience at the contact centers using digital transformation and checking other avenues. But, this poses three different sets of problems for different stakeholders.
What are the problems faced by different personas?
- Customers: Depending on the nature of the issue, customers have to face long wait times and often deal with the frustrating experience of never having their issues resolved at all. Moreover, they also experience reactive or non-responsive service and inconsistent and disconnected experiences, as customer service depends on the agent handling the request. This also results in recurring issues, as customer issues are not resolved in the first call due to consistency problems (as the customer gets a different agent each time), and much more.
- Agents: Being the facilitators of value, they often struggle with manual and repetitive tasks and queries. Monotony leaves them with little or no time to train themselves or upgrade their knowledge/skills. In addition, it becomes difficult for them to get any information due to the large volumes of siloed applications, poor documentation, lack of insights into customer behavior, etc.
- Business executives: With a great responsibility to channelize their resources and use them efficiently, business executives struggle with minimal to no insights into customer complaints, lack of comprehensive dashboards showing relevant KPIs, poor customer satisfaction/Net Promoter Score (NPS), etc. In terms of employees, executives struggle with high employee churn, low agent productivity, siloed operations across different lines of businesses, and more!
Solution
Mindtree has designed a six-step glide path to provide a base framework for cognitive and conversational customer service. It leverages the power of cognitive technologies and integrated service, sales, and marketing capabilities. These combined strengths help deliver improved customer experience, lower the cost of operations, and increase revenue. This model solves a set of problems step-by-step to help organizations reach maturity in their contact centers.
Transformation model for cognitive customer service
Step 1: Live chat
This step involves assigning human agents on the web or app-based chat platforms, enabling them to interact and serve multiple customers simultaneously. This chat option greatly helps in reducing the number of frustrated customers the agents face every day, as customers appreciate quick access to a human assistant instead of waiting for a long time to talk to an agent in the contact center. Moving away from a call-only approach to a hybrid approach that utilizes both chat and call options can increase agent efficiency by an estimate of 20-50%.
Step 2: Self-service
This step introduces virtual assistants or chatbots, in addition to the human agents already present on the web/app or IVR platforms. This allows for a greater degree of automation; chatbots enable human agents to respond only to urgent queries that cannot be solved without human intervention. Chatbots can also take care of other issues independently. Utilizing conversational bots to answer simple queries can reduce the inbound call volumes by an estimate of 20%.
Step 3: Omnichannel engagement
This step expands the customer service to include new channels such as Facebook Messenger, SMS, or Instant Messengers such as WhatsApp. This option facilitates the exchange of information even without a continuous 24X7 online presence. As a result of this, frustrating customer experiences drastically reduce, leading to better customer experience.
Step 4: Agent experience
To aid agents, this step empowers agents with AI-powered intelligent guidance, Nest Best Action recommendations, and a 360-degree view of a customer’s account. This enables agents to resolve customer queries much faster and efficiently, increasing First Call resolution (FCR) and reducing Average Handle Time (AHT.)
Step 5: Intelligent process automation
After optimizing the service level processes, the next step is to automate contact center processes through AI (Artificial Intelligence) and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) such as ticket and call triaging, document digitization, and more. Automation significantly reduces the time taken to complete the overall work volume and rework cases, leading to improved operational efficiency.
Step 6: Insight-driven service
The next step is to consolidate all the data, including the voice, text, and transactional data, which can be leveraged to gain insights that can be used to improve all aspects of customer service. The data will change depending on the kind of service offered by the telco and the objectives and requirements therein, but the end goal is to use data-driven insights to reduce costs, increase revenue, and improve the overall customer experience.
Benefits
By implementing the above 6-steps transformation model, Mindtree can deliver the following benefits to our stakeholders:-
Customers:
- Personalised service that helps in increasing customer experience
- More proactive service than reactive service, resulting in a better experience.
- Increase in First Call Resolution rate, which helps save customers time.
- Faster response to queries
- Reduction in missed calls and wait time in terms of call support
- More seamless, complete, and consistent experience
- Reduced customer effort in interacting with the brand
Contact center agents:
- More enriched job due to elimination/automation of several time-consuming and mundane tasks in the day
- More time available to solve customer issues and provide value-added services
- More time available for training/learning, unlocking the potential for professional growth
- Streamlined platform simplifies user experiences, making it easier for the agents to solve customer issues
- Reduced chances of human error due to process automation
- Employee empowerment by the democratization of insights
Business executives:
- Better Insights into customer’s behavior – buying trends, churn propensity, etc. allowing hidden opportunities to be seen and leveraged
- Real-time and enhanced reporting of multiple business-critical KPIs
- More revenue from upselling and reduction in lost opportunities.
- Improved data quality and management
- Improved Service KPIs (CSI, CSAT, NPS, Effort Score, 1st call resolution, etc.)
- Improved dealing with seasonality
- Closely aligning business departments for effective management such as promotions
- Cross-departmental visibility of all customer activity
- Allows the organization to operate in line with the brand promise
- More productivity from the same number of employees
- Overall smarter, more agile, and sleeker organization
Summary
Customer service should evolve—and Mindtree can help. By leveraging multiple technologies (live chat, self-service, omnichannel engagement, etc.) and delivering it in the right context (at the contact centers), there is tremendous scope for delivering superior customer experience and lowering the cost of operations, ultimately providing higher revenues.
The way forward
Customer service delivers a better experience, has more impact on sales, and reduces the total cost of ownership by using cognitive technologies.
Mindtree offers various consulting and implementation services that can help you assess the maturity of the state of customer service, build a business case, prioritize use cases, create a roadmap, and execute it. Our change management services can help you in operationalizing and running the transformed organization.
References section:
https://techsee.me/blog/customer-experience-in-telecom-industry/
https://acquire.io/blog/improve-customer-retention-in-telecom-industry/
https://telecom.economictimes.indiatimes.com/tele-talk/telecom-trends-from-customer-experience-management-to-customer-managed-experience/2274
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2019/10/14/the-7-biggest-technology-trends-that-will-transform-telecoms-in-2020/#7ecd561b6033
https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191129005243/en/Gaining-Edge-Telecom-Business-Infiniti-Research-Defines
https://allanlloyds.com/upcoming-events/237/12th-annual-customer-experience-management-in-telecom-summit/
https://www.ericsson.com/en/blog/2019/5/three-steps-for-how-to-improve-customer-experience-in-telecom
https://www.ringcentral.com/blog/improving-contact-center-productivity-in-the-telecoms-industry/
https://www.netomi.com/ai-in-telecom
https://www.csgi.com/insights/trends-transforming-the-telecom-industry-in-2020/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/05/20/no-stimulus-check-yet-4-million-americans-will-get-cash-on-prepaid-debit-cards/#38dbc98034b7
https://acquire.io/blog/improve-customer-retention-in-telecom-industry/
https://www.reachoutsuite.com/6-ways-telecom-companies-can-improve-customer-experience/
https://www.lynxanalytics.com/blog/nps-benchmark-for-telecommunication
https://www.ericsson.com/en/digital-services/trending/digital-experience
