Telecom

Invest in new value creation strategies to overcome the challenges of the telecom industry and deliver high-quality customer experiences.

Introduction

Following the unpredicted changes around the globe, the telecommunication industry needs to invest in new value creation strategies in order to achieve strong growth and offer high-quality customer experiences.

In today’s new era, telecommunication providers face critical challenges in their effort to meet the demands of the consumers. In times of crisis and uncertainty, customers expect self-service, omni-channel and instant communication more than ever. They also long for fast data connections and immediate resolutions to any network issues.

To meet consumer demands and stay on top of the situation, telcos are realigning their business strategies and they quickly embark on journeys to become digital service providers. This, of course, implies a number of challenges in terms of operations, architecture and customer service as well.

Key Challenges Ιn The Telecom Industry

Quick & Personalized Customer Service

The ever-growing number of requests, the inability to visit physical stores and the work from home reality, make it difficult for telecom service providers to deliver quick and empathetic assistance. During times of crisis, immediacy, personalization and omni-channel communication are more important than ever. Long waiting times, annoying to-and-for conversations with multiple executives to get an issue resolved and unsatisfactory automated responses can ruin a customer’s experience.

Complex Operational Processes

During the COVID-19 pandemic, operational tasks are becoming increasingly complex since face-to-face assistance is no more an option. Handling complex operations requires more resources and tools that increase the financial overhead of telecom companies. At the same time, customers aren’t willing to tolerate any delays in operational processes.

Remote Working

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, most companies are migrating to remote working. For the telecom industry, operating and providing support even with agents working from home is a huge challenge. Now more than ever, it is necessary to rely on easy-to-use technology that can be managed from the cloud.

Network Security

With the emergence of new technologies, ensuring network security has become another major challenge for telecom operators. New technologies bring in new threats to the security of networks and applications, especially while teams are working remotely and customers are asking for assistance from home. In order to meet customer expectations of system security, a number of operational and technical upgrades are required.

Leverage Over-the-Top Players

The smartphone revolution and the tremendous growth of messaging apps have led to the birth of a number of over-the-top (OTT) players such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger. The increase in the popularity of messaging apps is luring traffic away from what most telecommunication companies have to offer. The main challenge is implementing the industry’s best practices as fast as possible to continue delivering the best possible customer service. Including channels such as Facebook and WhatsApp in the customer service strategy is no longer a debate but a priority.

Opportunities

Technology-enabled opportunities empower your organization to address pressing challenges and compete in the marketplace.

Become the Digital Services Provider of choice

Create a 100% digital, end-to-end service creation, delivery, usage and care platform
Share or sell all undifferentiated assets, adopt cloud and virtualization, and make all processes digital and cognitive

Reinvent the company for agile service delivery and dramatic cost reduction

Accelerate conversion to cloud-based networks, processes and systems embracing AI, robotics, open source and security to unleash new agile services
Embrace processes transformation with over-the-top solutions, and re-skill the workforce and decision-making via agile approaches

Redefine industry position by investing in new value creation strategies

Leverage industry platforms, media, ad tech, IoT and block-chain to create new services and applications that add value to industry verticals
Orchestrate inclusive ecosystems and marketplaces of enterprise products and frenemies to drive new value capture models

Solutions

Migrate to Digital Channels

It is essential to migrate phone and face-to-face assistance to digital channels, such as WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Twitter or webchat. While support phone conversations are often slow and bureaucratic, these apps allow companies to develop digital, asynchronous, immediate and one-to-one communications between the customer and the agent.

Automate Your Customer Service

Once you have established new points of contact, you can easily automate simple customer conversations using AI-powered chatbots. This will help you ensure that your customers don’t have to wait in line for someone to answer their questions. Also, your customer care executives won’t have to spend time solving repetitive issues.

Use Live Chats to Handle More Complex Issues

Once your team is not wasting time with repetitive and frequent questions, they will have more time to actually handle complex issues that a chatbot cannot solve. They can easily do this through a live chat from home, without requiring speaking on the phone or sending emails, eliminating waiting times and complicated internal processes.

Technology from the Cloud

A software solution that can be easily used and managed from anywhere will help your working from home team. Agents will assist customers via live chat, they will have access to the chat history and will even connect to different channels such as WhatsApp and Facebook. These platforms also allow managers to check the chatbot’s performance, monitor conversations between agents and customers and analyze metrics to constantly improve their service.