Enhancing customer experience in telecoms: A path to successful enterprise transformation?

Sanyog Chaudhry of Wipro Limited

Refining the process for customer experience has long been a source of operational challenge for the telecommunications industry, says Sanyog Chaudhry of Wipro Ltd.

While provisioning and service assurance are key drivers for revenue and customer retention, inefficient administration processes often delay the turnaround from a customer’s first call to a service being made available. With successful customer management being a key driver of growth, it’s crucial that telecommunications companies find a way to improve their service.

This can be achieved by utilising automation technology and employing three approaches to customer interaction: minimisation, deflection and optimisation.

Contact minimisation

A data-driven order activation process that uses a self-service portal can offer customers quick and up to date information on their order status, while significantly lower the amount of time operators need to interact with customers. With customers able to help themselves in many cases, operators are freed up to focus on more pressing calls that need more human involvement.

The self-service environment can prove invaluable to customer experience, but only if it is well managed and there are minimal system failures. These are often caused by usage spikes or when on boarding new customers, which can help telecommunications companies focus their resources on supporting these times.

Using predictive analytical models can forecast when failures can occur, while cognitive robots can manage the situation by self-healing, prevention or auto-notifications. This means that affected customers can be warned in advance about possible outages, boosting customer experience and reducing demands on contact centres to manage the situation.

Contact deflection

By recognising the type of customer query and mapping it to the right channel calls can be deflected for the best, fastest and most cost-effective outcome. Online channels that telecom companies can utilise include forums, FAQs, self-help videos, virtual assistants and social media.

This approach has an advantage over a call centre process: customers end up generating and sharing new ideas to resolve problems in ways that are useful to other users. As a result, customers often feel they are able to solve their problems quickly and easily without the need for additional contact.

For the contact deflection strategy to work, alternate channels must be set up on intelligent platforms that require minimal monitoring and management, but that provide customers with the correct sorts of information at the right times.

Contact optimisation

After moving the customer to the right channel, analytics can be leveraged to create smart and immersive interactions that improve the customer experience. Agents should be able to view customer details, problem areas and possible solutions on a single screen instead of having to go through multiple applications.

This can be done by using customer profiles, behaviour, past interactions, hundreds of use cases built into the system, business logic, and so on, with appropriate workflows. Embedded cognitive models can be utilised to help customers by offering appropriate solutions with issue anticipation, dynamic workflows and next-best-actions built-in. These approaches also have the effect of reducing overall training time for contact centre agents.

In addition to enhancing customer experience, these solutions can also improve field employee efficiency as well as boosting call centre productivity and lowering costs across the provisioning, fulfilment and assurance processes.

In our experience, automation of processes in contact management with a view to enhancing customer experience can have a deep impact across the organisation. With all the additional insights on the customer developed through an automated contact management system, telecommunications providers can then look to embark on a wider-reaching enterprise transformation.

With the vast amount of data being generated on customers, operators, enterprise transformation can quickly shape the data into business intelligence and impact practically every area of operation with exponential improvement of business objectives and KPIs.

The author of this blog is Sanyog Chaudhry, senior manager, Enterprise Operations Transformation at Wipro Limited, focusing on Global Media & Telecom.

About the author:

Sanyog Chaudhry has over nine years of experience, spanning across strategic and operational consulting. He works with product development teams to leverage emerging technologies, and helps telecommunication and media institutions improve their performance, from strategy to operations.

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