AI-Powered Contact Centers are Transforming Customer Experience in Telecom Industry

By Dr. Rashi Gupta, Chief Data Officer and Co-Founder, Rezo.ai

In the last two decades, India’s telecom industry has leapfrogged to become the second-largest in the world. The telecom industry has 1.2 billion subscribers as of March 2021 across wireless, wireline, and Internet services segments. In addition, the rural subscriber density has touched 60.27% in March 2021, from 58.79% in March 2020. The sheer scale and growth trajectory of the industry are fascinating for telecom players. However, growth brings along its challenges as well.

One of the critical challenges for operating in the telecom space is managing customer experience and expectations. As smartphones become an integral part of our day-to-day lives, even the slightest glitch in the service, i.e., network downtime, mismatched payment credits, connection shifting, etc., creates anxiety for customers. As a result, telecom companies need to set up large-scale contact centres to attend to customer complaints, queries, and service requests over calls, emails, and messaging platforms. However, the increasing telecom penetration means that people at these contact centres have their workload growing leaps and bounds. As a result, they may sometimes complain without any contextual data or miss responding to an email, adding to the customer’s agony.

AI to Transform the Telecom Contact Centres

Over the years, telecom companies have accumulated a rich repository of consumer data. With the help of AI, this data unlocks meaningful insights about customer behavior and expectations. Therefore, AI-powered tools have become a very effective way to support humans managing telecom contact centres. For example, these tools can provide an automated voice, email, or text response to an iterative customer complaint, queries, and service requests.

Faster turnaround time- AI-based tools use pre-defined information, fine-tune it in the current context, and respond to customers automatically. Thus, tasks such as collecting information about an issue, acknowledging customer communication, suggesting the resolution timeline, etc., do not require any manual intervention are done at a lightning-fast speed. Human agents can spend their time and energy on more complicated issues that need their attention.

Personalization: -Personalization is an essential aspect of customer service in the telecom industry. It helps customers feel appreciated and valued every time they reach out to their service provider. Using AI-based voice, text, email, and messenger tools help telecom contact centres personalize the customer experience.

Effective resolution: It is challenging to ascertain customer queries and complaints from unstructured text or calls. Moreover, with the massive volume of inbound communication at telecom contact centres, it becomes tough for human executives to analyze the requests accurately and offer an effective solution. On the other hand, the erroneous solution reduces the company’s credibility and hampers the customer experience. Automated, AI-based contact centres leverage powerful NLP engines to interpret customer complaints, map the frequency, and streamline the processes. Thus, the solution provided by a telecom service provider’s contact centres becomes more reliable.

Stronger relationships and cross-selling opportunities: Machine learning capabilities help telecom companies secure deeper insights about customer interactions. These insights enable contact centre agents or automated systems to be more effective with each successive conversation. Some of these improvements are impactful greetings, language selection, tonality, and other cultural nuances. Additionally, these insights equip contact centre agents to cross-sell a new service or package after a pleasant in-person query resolution.

Since telecom services are largely standardized, companies need to create an edge through a better customer experience.  AI-powered contact centres help telecom providers achieve this goal, along with operational cost optimization. Thus, it is a win-win situation for businesses as well as consumers.

Dr. Rashi Gupta works as the Chief Data Scientist, and helped Co-found, Rezo.ai, an AI-powered contact center.