Communication service providers (CSPs) have helped get countries through the pandemic. Their networks and services ensured children could continue learning during lockdowns and have kept people connected, able to work from home and entertained via a boom in streaming services, writes Vladimir Mitrasinovic, regional vice president at Amdocs.
Yet nearly two years since the Covid era began, it’s still ecommerce leaders who are setting the standard for digital customer experience (CX). These brands do well in customer satisfaction league tables run by the Institute for Customer Service (ICS) and others because of how slick and holistic the online experience is.
CSPs know the inherent value of omnichannel and digital in retaining and winning customers in a competitive market. Notwithstanding obstacles and diversions on the way, they have made and will make great strides in their journey towards improved CX. And as telecoms looks to raise its game and compete with ecommerce and other sectors, the good news for CSPs and their customers is that CX is currently a key focus for the sector.
Indeed, a recent survey by Mobileum found that 56% of telecoms operators ranked enhancing CX as their top priority for 2022, followed by ensuring a well-performing and reliable network (19%), mitigating security and risk threats (13%) and cutting costs (13%).
So how should CSPs go about taking CX to the next level in 2022? For me, there are two routes that should be followed.
Firstly, embrace greater automation and artificial intelligence (AI) throughout the customer’s digital journey. While there will always be a need for the human touch in customer service and CX, there’s evidence that digital-savvy consumers enjoy using online self-service tools and chatbots seeing them as a hassle-free way of getting things done quickly. This is where a CSP can play to its strengths in how it understands and exploits customer usage patterns to deliver improved experiences.
AI, of course, isn’t purely about self-service rather it can take the human-assisted experience to the next level. It can also be used to do the hard work of analysing overwhelmingly huge data sets and then creating insights that can be used proactively to offer personalised assistance or services at scale. CSPs can become even more service centric and begin to reap the benefits of these data insights to create new digital processes to enhance customer experiences rather than simply digitise existing processes and service models.
Secondly, when it comes to being more agile and customer-centric, legacy systems get blamed for holding back change. Some commentators like McKinsey call for a total reset and a complete migration to a greenfield setting for network and infrastructure. More appropriately for CSPs, a cloud migration strategy can help transform performance. Many CSPs are on this path already. Some have done the lift and shift of existing systems into the cloud but in 2022 we will see many more reinventing applications, systems and processes entirely for the cloud.
In this respect, the cloud can be a hub where a CSP can behave most like one of those customer-centric digital native businesses. A truly cloud-native environment enables a CSP to work flexibly and efficiently with partners on future innovations, from collaborative development and testing to shared deployment and analytics. In this way, the burden of raising a CSP’s CX game is shared, accessing an ecosystem of technologies and technology talent that shares how modern software and infrastructure is built using open application programme interfaces (APIs) and microservices among other techniques.
CX is going to be a key battleground for CSPs in 2022 and beyond. The CSPs who thrive will be those who focus on how they deliver great digital customer journeys and service outcomes through ambitious programmes around AI and cloud native migration.
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