Resetting the customer experience while driving operational excellence
Telecom operators and service providers proved their mettle in 2020, playing an invaluable role in facilitating communication and commerce throughout a period of prolonged social distancing. Whether it was by surging capacity to support millions of people working from home or by adjusting data caps and payment terms to help financially stressed consumers, leading telecom companies responded with a level of speed and agility that could benefit their brands for years to come.
However, as the world slowly emerges from the crisis, telecom businesses know that the challenges they were facing before the pandemic haven’t gone away. Despite their key part in supporting digital transformations in other industries, many providers are aware that they have work to do in leveraging digital technologies to transform their own customer experience and boost operational efficiencies.
What’s more, the pace of technology-driven disruption is relentless across the industry. The rise of 5G, and network-centric business models, for instance, demands significant investments in new infrastructure. New connected devices, applications and over-the-top services, meanwhile, have dramatically raised consumer expectations.
The total number of 5G subscriptions is expected to grow from around 220 million in 2020 to nearly 2.8 billion by the end of 2025.,
With a more complex set of products, plans and tariffs, telecoms businesses are under growing pressure to better understand their customer base and provide personalised solutions. Achieving this goal at scale for a customer base in the millions is no trivial task, especially with subscribers demanding rapid, seamless service.
In the background, the mix of products and bundled solutions has made processes such as order fulfilment, billing and customer care more complicated than ever. With millions of customer requests spanning an omnichannel environment, remaining cost-efficient while meeting consumer expectations is harder than ever.
The mission is clear and the pressure to get it right is higher than ever: telecom operators that will thrive in the years to come will be those that boost customer experiences, drive operational efficiency and get a head start in monetising new technologies like 5G. Let’s look at three priorities for the telecom sector in the years to come and some of the cloud solutions that will help providers and operators gain a competitive edge.
Transforming the customer experience
For the telecom industry, providing superior customer service and support via their contact centres while keeping control of operating costs is a delicate balance. It is also one that has become more difficult to strike during the pandemic months with many customers who would usually have sought support from retail outlets turning to call centres instead.
It’s thus not surprising that contact centre support is often a major pain point in operators’ relationships with clients. When a subscriber phones the contact centre for service or support, it is usually because they have encountered a challenge such as a network fault or a billing error. Compounding their frustration with long holding times, impersonal service or slow call resolution is a sure recipe for churn in an industry where customer loyalty levels are notoriously low.
While operators have shown resilience in not only pivoting their call centres to remote working models but also in surging capacity, they also know that throwing more agents at the problem is not a sustainable, long-term solution. Many found it complex and expensive to rapidly train and recruit employees to meet demand at different points in the pandemic.
Others struggled to respond as quickly to their customers as they would have liked to, while the long hours and extreme call volumes have taken their toll on the frontline worker in the contact centre. It’s not surprising in that context that many telecom businesses have started to deploy artificial intelligence (AI) and other intelligent automation solutions to pick up some of the slack.
Today’s cloud-based AI solutions enable providers to rapidly deploy virtual agents as first-line responders to subscriber queries. Whether through voice call or chat, customers need not go through menu prompts or option trees; they simply say or type their request, and the natural-language recognition feature finds the best way to assist them.
Rather than displacing humans, these virtual agents take some pressure off contact centre agents by providing conversational self-service support via chat or over the phone. They can, for instance, recommend personalised responses at each turn of the conversation, helping care agents to effectively answer customer queries.
Google Contact Center AI
Contact Center AI virtual agents assist human agents
Contact Center AI, a conversational AI solution from Google Cloud, uses AI intelligence to enable rich conversational experiences between virtual agents and customers through chat and over the phone. Telecoms businesses around the world are already using this solution to help customers to rapidly resolve service or billing issues.
This alleviates the demand on human agents to answer common and repetitive questions, allowing them to focus on more complex cases. Contact Center AI can be available 24/7 to offer personalised support, immediate service, and quick issue resolution for many of subscribers’ most common issues or concerns.
Contact Center AI can help a contact centre improve call deflection rates, achieve shorter handling times, and reduce agent training costs, making overall operations faster and more effective. What’s more, it can empower human agents with continuous support during their calls and chats by identifying intent and providing real-time, step-by-step assistance.
The machine learning model that powers the solution can learn from millions of anonymised historical support logs about the type of questions customers ask and how they phrase their questions. It is constantly learning and evolving as new offers change or expand, enabling continuous improvement in efficiencies and in the customer experience.
Monetising new services and improving operational efficiencies
During 2021 and beyond, momentum is set to grow behind 5G network services and edge computing. The migration towards the new technologies could represent more than a mere opportunity to deliver and monetise a faster mobile connection for consumers—it could also be a chance to deliver innovative, value-generating services and solutions for business-to-business clients.
Telecoms companies can, for example, reach organisations such as retailers, transportation companies or manufacturers with powerful Internet of Things offerings at the edge that help these clients drive efficiencies and new customer services. Those telecom providers that get this right stand to drive exceptional return on investment from their 5G infrastructure and services.
To support telecoms companies in this transformation, CloudSmiths can help them leverage the power of Anthos for Telecom. This solution brings Google’s Anthos cloud application platform to the network edge, allowing telecommunications companies to run their applications wherever it makes the most sense.
Anthos for Telecom
An open platform for network-centric applications
Google originally launched Anthos in 2019 as part of the Google Cloud Services Platform family, empowering organisations to use the same interface to manage workloads across multiple cloud systems. Anthos for Telecom tailors this platform to the telecoms industry enabling providers and operators to manage 5G, Edge, and multi-cloud services from a single platform.
The capabilities in Anthos can help telecom companies deliver compelling experiences and services relating to navigation, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, Internet of Things and more. Operators can partner with Google and Independent Software Vendors to rapidly develop and deploy new vertical services and applications that are based on Google Cloud core components, including Anthos, AI, and machine learning.
By partnering with Google, telecoms companies can fast-track their edge, 5G and Internet of Things strategies and reach new customers. Telecom businesses will benefit from hosting their apps at the network edge, in turn offering them reduced costs on data, better security and lower latency.
Examples of the applications enabled through 5G delivered at the edge include enriched in-store visual experiences streaming directly from the network at retailers. Manufacturers, meanwhile, could run advanced AI-based visual inspections directly from 5G-enabled devices—all without the need for local processing power—helping reduce cost and the need for on-site space.
Becoming a data-driven telco
Many telecom businesses aspire to end constant customer churn as subscribers cycle between providers chasing the best deals. Effective use of data to tailor offerings and recommendations to customer needs and to respond effectively to their service requests is key to getting this right.
Today’s AI-powered data analytics solutions can enable a telco to, for example, customise recommendations for consumers based on their content habits, or proactively suggesting the best mobile and fibre bundles based on cellular consumption patterns. Telecom companies can store, process, and analyse data in real time and build personalisation models on top of this data.
Intelligent business software with Looker
Driving better outcomes through smarter data-driven experiences
CloudSmiths has partnered with Looker—today part of the Google Cloud platform—to offer providers and operators a tool that can be tailored to their workflow, With Looker, companies can drive a multitude of data experiences, from modern business intelligence and embedded analytics to workflow integrations and custom data apps.
The platform offers a unified interface to access the truest, most up-to-date version of a company’s data, even when this data is scattered across multiple business systems that do not talk to each other. With Looker, decision-makers across the organisation get a centralised view of all data and real-time information.
Looker for Customer Support Analytics
Customer support has become a critical component of telecom businesses everywhere. Their support teams should be responsive, knowledgeable about historic encounters with each customer, and effective at resolving each customer’s issues.
Looker for Customer Support Analytics allows the entire team to access customised analysis that measures the support business. This provides support teams with the analysis they need to offer optimal support, improve support processes, and automatically share findings with other relevant teams to round out analysis of the customer journey.
Customer loyalty leaders increase revenue 2.5 times faster than industry peers and deliver two to five times the shareholder returns over the next decade.
Looker and customer revenue
Thanks to advances in data storage and processing technologies, providers and operators can implement ongoing monitoring and management of customer health. The task focuses on the goals of retaining existing revenue, driving new revenue, and increasing efficiencies to reduce customer lifecycle management costs.
Looker helps telecom businesses to achieve these goals by:
•Centralising data—Looker offers a central database to eliminate the need for manual reconciliation of all the customer data.
•Creating meaningful customer health scores—Lookers lets companies create and refine custom health scores using any inputs they want.
•Translating analysis to action—Using Looker, telecom companies can perform thorough analysis that gets to the heart of how and why customers make their choices.
Working with CloudSmiths to become a customer-centric and operationally efficient telecom business
Telecom organisations work with CloudSmiths to become highly efficient, data-driven entities. Many collaborate with us to use cloud technologies, AI, machine learning, and APIs to modernise their systems and streamline their processes. As certified and trusted Google, Amazon and Microsoft partners, we ensure transparent, cost-effective solutions across all major providers.
Contact us today to learn more about how our solutions enable you to optimise operations, elevate automation and accelerate digital transformation.
