Businesses are moving from transaction-based engagement to relationship-based engagement. Research indicates interesting statistics about customer service satisfaction levels. A survey by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs showed, among other indices, that 59% of consumers in the U.S would not hesitate to try a new company if they offered better customer service in telecom. This highlights the need for improved customer service interaction. Customers of telecom networks experience better satisfaction levels when their issues are resolved faster, without having to move through different levels of interaction, and prolonged waits.
1. Engineering an AI-driven transformation in telecom customer service
The need for speed in resolutions is linked to the need for effectively handling queries and issues. And this is all about supporting the customer service representative with crucial tidbits of information. Getting the larger picture often hinges on identifying the little cues, the finer nuances. And Artificial Intelligence in telecom has been effectively doing it for companies that have identified the need to differentiate or disappear from the preferences of customers.
One of the many aspects of AI-assisted customer service in telecom includes collation of information through linguistic and statistical algorithms. Keyword-based processing of issues has become a reality thanks to AI that offers suggestions and effective responses to the queries of customers.
Customer care functions work best when post-call analytics help teams understand the needs of the customer and the best way to handle dissatisfaction. This is achieved through insights that indicate customer preferences and issues faced in a given scenario. Such insights, available on simple and uncomplicated dashboards, help executives adopt a proactive approach during interactions. The conventional reactive approaches are unlikely to help improve customer satisfaction levels as the need is for swift and effective pre-empted resolutions.
2. NBA Analytics: Rejigging the Customer Service interaction in telecom
Pelatro’s Next Best Action (NBA) Analytics leverages the power of Machine Learning to offer deep insights that lead to problem resolution at the first touchpoint. Transaction history, interaction records, and customer’s user preferences are just some of the key inputs that go into advanced algorithms and filters to suggest a summary that offers a recommendation which suits the needs of the customer. This helps to reduce the threat of customer churn and also offers the possibility for upsell and cross-sell. The module offers the flexibility of making appropriate changes to the recommendations, based on the latest inputs from the customer while on the call. The GUI-based module, empowers CX in telecom and marketing personnel to roll out the offers directly, cutting down the need for a separate process.
3. ‘Predictive’ and ‘intuitive’: the key to higher satisfaction levels
A handful of telecom majors have plunged right into AI. They rely on it to pair inbound calls in a jiffy with customer care executives, best equipped to handle them. For instance, the transaction history combined with the nature of queries makes certain calls unique. This demands the handling of such calls by customer care executives armed with the required information and skills.
Elsewhere, Vodafone has rolled out chatbot services, in addition to offering app-based resolutions to simple queries, thereby delivering a double impact on customer service. On the one hand, the app-based resolution offers an immediate resolution to queries, while on the other, it frees the bandwidth on regular channels to handle queries. Holding various aspects together to provide a better level of interaction and satisfaction, technology has elevated customer experience in telecom to levels unimagined earlier.
Telecom service providers must fully recognize the need for understanding, analyzing and predicting customer demands, Customer Churn, preferences and grievances. Services must be delivered across the board and silo-based relationships with one customer who opts for different products must be done away with. AI in telecom is helping service providers by routing multi-channel information, mining it and offering suggestions based on past experiences.
The standout customer service fact that emerged from the survey by the White House Office of Consumer Affairs is that it took a dozen positive experiences to compensate for one negative and unresolved experience. This makes it all the more important for service providers to offer a rich customer experience in telecom, in the face of competition that gets tougher by the day.
