Why Telcos Must Re-imagine customer experience to unlock new opportunities

As the Indian telecom industry matures, there is growing pressure on communications service providers (CSPs) to deliver an exceptional experience to an increasingly discerning consumer.

The rule-books of successful and engaging brand experiences have dramatically changed in today's digital-first environment. In addition, the two years of the pandemic compelled consumers to get accustomed to a more digital lifestyle and evolved their expectations to demand more from brands. As a result, ensuring a seamless customer experience across all channels is emerging as one of the most crucial factors in assuring brand loyalty.

This is especially true in India, which has a young demographic with an average age of just over 28 years. Ensuring a best-in-class digital experience across all communications channels is crucial to having a deep, engaging relationship with millennial and digital natives.

CSPs aren’t immune to this shift in consumer expectations, which is why they need to go beyond offering vanilla connectivity services. Opportunities abound with new services like financial and banking services. So, customer churn means that CSPs not only lose a user of telecom services but also of financial and other services.

CSPs can also learn from other industries like finance and retail on how to deliver next-generation customer experience and real-time personalization to compete with them in the new world of high-value 5G services.

The impending plan for Indian CSPs to launch 5G later this year, will enable technology for several new use cases like augmented reality (AR), online gaming and virtual reality (VR), among others. It promises to open up new revenue opportunities for CSPs, making it critical for them to provide a world-class user experience, so they are able to sell new services to their existing customers.

To tap into new opportunities, CSPs must deploy a holistic strategy to measure and understand their customers' journey and take proactive measures to address changes in the behaviour or expectations of customers in the moment.

All eyes on the customer

With the launch of 5G services around the corner, time is of the essence for Indian CSPs to get their customer experience strategy in order and here is why.

To make an impact and stand out in a highly commoditized world, the creation of the best customer experience is at an all-time high. The desire for immediate results and communication is the industry standard and by enabling extraordinary customer experiences, CSPs can drive better business outcomes, create quicker time to value and lower risk. Those who fail to deliver great customer experiences across channels once 5G hits will lose market share to competitors who can and will also fail to keep subscribers loyal to their brand resulting in less revenue.

The full potential of 5G can be realized by Indian CSPs if they ensure a consistent and seamless experience across an ever-broadening mix of digital channels. This means that the CSPs must gain a clearer understanding of what their customers want and how and where they need to deliver services. Be it web, email or IVR (interactive voice response), consumers expect proactive, personalized and quick resolution to any issue.

Engaging consumers on the digital channels they prefer is a uniquely large challenge for CSPs, mostly because CSPs offer so many. CSG's State of the Customer Journey, 2022 report found that telecom companies use 36% more channels to reach customers than the average company of other industries. This makes it all the more important for Indian CSPs to understand how consumers interact across channels in order to keep them engaged and loyal to the brand.

The study also found that CSPs got clever with their channel mix and revealed that the web (56%) and phone (43%) were the two main channels used by the telecom companies in 2021. Typically, CSPs have long term relationships with their customers, making it imperative to make the journey of new users intuitive and personalized. By leveraging analytics and the sophisticated segmentation to show what future customers are looking for before they even sign up, CSPs can elevate their brand two-fold and ensure consistent communication at any given time throughout the customer journey

Seize the capabilities of 5G

Most CSPs in India conventionally focus on customer acquisition rather than customer retention. However, in the 5G ecosystem, customer retention and rapid innovation will become more critical as telcos look to launch new digital services and focus on dynamic experiences to expand into new areas.

The quest to elevate customer experience is no less daunting of a task,especially when every interaction with the brand matters and impacts its overall perception in a consumer's mind. Extraordinary customer experiencerequires a holistic and dynamic approach, where all teams– marketing, sales, operations, strategy, and CX –align to understand the customer andsynthesize feedback from the right places to find the best ways to drive critical changes and deliver more impactful value to users.

By leveraging quantitative and qualitative insights from real-time interactions, customer profile assessments, and analytics, knowing your customer can become a more intuitive and informed process. This data-driven approach can help CSPs instantly realize what they're doing well and where they need improvement. Data silos can be removed and true insights can come to light that will put customer experience at the tip of the spear for CSPs who want to deliver the next generation of game changing, digital experiences. Ultimately, the full potential of 5G can only be realized when CSPs not only rethink the products and services they deliver, but also emphasize quality of the experiences they offer.

Authored By: Mark Smith, Vice President of Digital Engagement Solutions at CSG