The Shape of Things to Come From Legacy to Digitimacy
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.
Source: Covid-19: How Telcos Can Reset Their Customer Strategy, Bain & Company, 2020
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.
