For years, telecommunication firms haven’t had to worry about how clients feel. The technology simply had to work well in order to attract customers. Better reception, lower rates and wider coverage were the keys to success. It was an admittedly low bar. As a result, telecoms developed one of the absolute worst customer service reputations around. Ask anyone for their worst customer service experience and they’ll almost certainly name a telecom.
Calls dropped, service blackouts, and hours spent on-hold are among the most common horror stories. It’s a regularly occurring pattern with first-to-market technology vendors. For their customers, the novelty of a life-changing functionality is worth the headache of shoddy service. Businesses simply aren’t motivated to get their act together, and customers eventually accept it. Thankfully, some recent market developments have triggered a major shift.
Today’s youngest generations have never known a world without advanced telecom services, making them much harder to impress. As Millennials and Gen Z reach their peak spending years, they’re demanding more from businesses that have, until now, rested on the novelty of their products. Smartphone technology and the depreciation of fixed-term contracts have brought switching costs down to virtually nothing, and customers are now free to take their business wherever they please.
It’s all combined to finally kick the crutches out from under the longest-standing industry incumbents. After decades of bad service, providers are now scrambling to develop, test and deploy new practices and technologies that keep customers happier for longer. As much as we may like to think these companies have finally seen the error of their ways, the truth is that it’s a fiscal decision. Industry benchmarks show that it’s twice as expensive for telecoms to acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one. When the requirements for retaining a customer change, so to must any firm that wants to stay in business.
In a 2016 telecommunications report, the American Customer Satisfaction Index found that the telecom industry had finally reversed a two-year slide in overall customer satisfaction. Managing director David VanAmburg remarked, “Now that contracts are becoming a historical relic, wireless companies are doing more to attract and retain customers in an environment where switching from one provider to another has never been easier.” The trend continued in the 2017 report, where overall satisfaction increased an additional 0.65 percent, suggesting that the battle for the best customer experience is underway, and it’s already started reshaping the telecom landscape as we know it.
Quick On Their Feet
While the rate of telecom product innovation has plateaued, there’s still plenty of room for improvement in the tools service customer needs. Leroy B. Glimmeger, global president of assurance and managed technologies at Huawei Technologies, explains how one Hong Kong telecom firm altered its service capabilities in an effort to pull ahead in the highly competitive enterprise telecom sector.
“Engineers historically had needed three hours to pinpoint the location of a network fault,” Glimmeger explained. But, “this telco installed sophisticated monitoring technology that shrank the response time to just 30 minutes.” He further explained how, as a result, the firm “reduced complaints from its high-revenue customers by 47% for 3G networks and 34% for 4G, while its churn rate … has dropped from the double digits a few years back to just 1.5% today.” While faster response times have proven effective in cutting down resolution turnaround, some providers are looking for ways to address issues before customers even know they exist.
Predicting The Future
The rising demand for customer experience solutions has sparked compelling research from third-parties looking to get in on the action. In a 2017 report, customer experience intelligence firm Inmoment, polled 11,000 telecom customers in an effort to analyze the nuances of customer loyalty and uncover helpful insights that could help providers get a leg up on their competition. By measuring sentiment over time, the study’s authors discovered that customer satisfaction consistently dropped roughly one year after switching to a new provider, regardless of who they were with. For vendors frantically searching for ways to keep customers happy, this is invaluable information. “If telecoms take this baggage into consideration and preempt the negative impact with improved experiences, they earn a major opportunity to convert hesitant acquired customers into brand loyalists, and even advocates.”
Keeping It Real
Plenty of pundits have lauded Artificial Intelligence technologies like chatbots as being the next big thing in customer service. Research suggests, however, that it’s at least a few years off, and that providers looking to keep modern customers happy would be better served training human beings to address customer frustrations. The same study by Inmoment found that “customers across all service lines who’d had a personal interaction with a brand representative reported higher satisfaction levels than those who had not.”
The report’s authors go on to explain that, “To better exceed customer needs, telecoms must train team members on how to successfully navigate the emotional and functional factors of unsatisfying experiences.” While a human layer may be ideal for problem-solving, studies show there’s equal value in helping customers help themselves when it comes to day-to-day usage.
Empowering Others
Provider subsidiaries like Koodo mobile have managed to capture significant market share thanks in part to their commitment to self-serve tools. By offering web & mobile-based account portals, customers can view their monthly usage, billing details and plans without the assistance of a customer service rep. It’s a philosophy that has allowed even enterprise providers to gain traction with their customers. In a case study for IBM analytics, Mexican telecom firm Telefónica México discussed how they were able to curry favor with their corporate clients by adopting the same approach at a more advanced level.
“We were able to make the perfect match between what we already have in place coming from the network and what we already also had in regards to the customer information and the data plans, the voice plans,” said Rodolfo Carlos López Lozano, project manager for Telefónica México’s corporate dashboard initiative, which provided clients with bespoke views of their usage stats. As a result, the company saw a 30% drop in call-center volume and a 10% increase in campaign-related revenue, which constitutes a stark contrast to the traditional frustrations associated with telecoms.
After decades of inattention, it’s been an uphill battle. Three of the five telecom industry verticals ranked dead last for customer satisfaction across all those polled. The industry as a whole has its work cut out for them, but necessity has already given rise to a few particular innovations that show signs of pulling telecoms out of their decades-long slump and into their customers’ good graces.