Keeping It Conversation-centric With Telecoms

Amid the disruption, COVID-19 has brought upon all aspects of life, telecommunication (telecom) infrastructures have played a key role in keeping our entire world connected during such socially distant times. Currently, India accounts for the second-largest telecoms industry in the world with market size of approximately 1.16 billion. This number is expected to grow exponentially, driven by strong consumer demand and conducive regulatory frameworks.

In addition, due to the resurgence of new COVID-19 variants alongside evolving consumer preferences, spending more time connecting online and less time in person continues to be the norm. According to a Deloitte Insights report, this is already the “new normal” for more than 80% of consumers.

Except for wireless carriers, the industry continues to struggle with poor customer satisfaction and loyalty. Since the start of the pandemic, customers have been plagued with uncertainties that have led them to turn to customer service platforms as a way to help navigate their anomalous set of challenges and concerns. Record call volumes logged resulted in extensive wait times for assistance during the height of the pandemic, which further exacerbated long-standing customer experience (CX) problems.

What seemed like an opportunity to build stronger relationships with consumers through such times of crisis quickly became a heavy blow to many companies’ hard-earned reputations. That leaves us with the question: How can telecom providers convert high demands into a sustainable advantage as we advance, given the track records of customer dissatisfaction and churn?

Simply put, customer service will always be about conversations – whether through voice or digital interactions. Without the ability to understand the end-to-end conversation, point solutions are often unable to bring about the type of contact center transformation that telecoms need to make significant leaps in customer satisfaction and loyalty.

That is where the need for a conversation-centric, platform-based approach comes in. By integrating the latest advances in conversational artificial intelligence (AI), automation, analytics, and other emerging technologies, telecoms can truly understand the entirety of customer conversations. A conversation-centric AI platform can effectively optimise customer and agent experience through four key approaches to deliver significant, measurable business value.

Making customers happy with intelligent self-service

Customer conversations typically start through self-service channels. However, in reality, many existing self-service options are more frustrating than helpful, as they fail to address customers’ needs effectively. This can be mitigated through the help of a conversation-centric AI platform.

A better understandingof customer intent and sentiments can help increase self-service and automation rates. These effectively resolve transactional interactions such as paying bills, basic inquiries about services and tracking usage among others to increase agent efficiency and reduce customer response times.

Intelligent virtual assistants (IVA) can help to enhance an organization’s self-service operations. These machine learning systems comprehend customer questions and deliver appropriate next steps to complete the customer self-service experience. Utilizing IVA alongside an AI platform can help create an optimized, frictionless CX.

 Reducing friction in the customer and agent experience

Another fundamental approach to improving CX is enabling agents to be more productive through Conversational AI tools.

By leveraging AI to guide agents on the next best actions while automating repetitive tasks using RPA, contacts centers can make every agent their best agent without weeks and months of classroom training and on-boarding. Not only will they be able to quickly ramp up their agents, but also minimize – or even eliminate – costly human errors that occur from overworked agents to deliver a great customer experience.

Additionally, Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities can track customer and agent-centric patterns across voice, email, text, or chat, offering vital insights to identify salient friction points in the customer journey.

Automating after-call work to optimize experiences

This next approach targets what happens after the conversation ends with the customer. What happens after the call ends is just as important to business outcomes for the telecom industry as what happens during the call itself.

Some of these after-call work (ACW) include summarising the call, updating systems, and fulfilling promises made during the conversation. Having a Conversational-AI platform enables automation of repetitive tasks and end-to-end business processes. For example, the platform can listen to and transcribe conversations in real-time, automatically creating a call summary for the agent to review once the call ends. This optimizes agent performance and increases their capacity to handle more complicated customer inquiries.

Capturing and managing promises automatically

The last approach addresses promise management – a critical component in any customer conversation. It directly impacts call handling times, wait times, and customer satisfaction and loyalty as measured by the Net Promoter Score (NPS). In particular, missed promises are known to result in a significant negative impact on NPS typically.

Using Robotic Process Automation (RPA), promises and commitments made by agents during the conversation can be logged in real-time and follow-up actions to align with customer expectations are automatically provided immediately after the call.

Moving forward, telecoms need to take bigger, bolder steps than ever before to improve customer and agent experiences. As the telecom industry becomes even more central to how a society operates, Conversational AI will serve as the cornerstone for optimizing every conversation, from transforming the customer and agent experience to driving customer satisfaction while generating greater loyalty and revenue. Understanding how to keep CX conversation-centric is imperative for the telecom industry as it will ultimately enable a business to deliver a positive, frictionless experience for customers and agents.

Authored by Ravi Saraogi, Co-founder and President of Uniphore APAC