Can  customers trust Telcos?

Today’s customers want companies they can trust.

Whether you are a B2B brand providing telecom services to large enterprises or a B2C retailer, your customers’ loyalty depends solely on the service you can provide.

In recent years, the importance of customer relationships and excellent service has only increased. The pandemic has greatly impacted the interaction between brands and shoppers. Today, if you can not prove that you are there for your customers when they need you most, they will not stick with you.

In recent years, telecom companies have not always stood out as the friendliest companies. Many older brands struggled with a reputation for tying their customers into complex contracts and being fairly inflexible when it came to consumer needs. In the last two years, however, some telecom companies have begun to change.

They have recognized the undeniable change in the market and are now forced to rethink the way they support and satisfy their customers in complex situations.

The question is: Is your telecom company on the right track?

Improve CX By Getting to Know Your Customers

While the concept of adapting to a new consumer landscape may be daunting for many telecom companies, there is good news: there are many ways for the right brands to make the transition. It all starts with understanding the needs of your target audience.

Great customer service has been the key differentiator for any brand for some time now. Not only are 86% of customers willing to pay more for great customer service, but customers are more likely to make repeat and impulse purchases if they have the right experience.

For most businesses, including telecom companies, a great experience is a personalized experience. Your customers want solutions that are tailored to their specific needs and expectations. This means that the best way to improve your customer experience strategy is to know your target customers better.

If you do not already have one, start by creating user personas that help you outline the characteristics and traits of your most frequent customers. Answer questions like what size businesses do you typically serve, and what telco features are these customers looking for? Do your customers want UCaaS via the cloud or a comprehensive global network for contact center support?

Once you know your audience, you can tailor your service updates based on what matters most to them. For example, you could:

• Optimize network performance with machine learning to improve reliability
• Use asset management to examine the health of the devices your customers are using and fix any issues immediately.
• Enable proactive network management by processing data from customer devices, network elements, service delivery platforms, and more to gain insights for technical operations.

Creating Personalized Solutions for Customers

Adding new tools and services to your offering based on your knowledge of your audience and their priorities is a good start. But you can also look for ways to improve customer lifetime value through personalized packages and service offerings.

Talking to your customers and learning about their individual needs will give you a more accurate view of the type of additional support you can offer in times of need. For example, during the pandemic, many businesses struggled to pay for their telecom services using the same structure they had been using prior to 2020.

To overcome this problem, some leading telecom companies started offering things like digital payment deferral. This allowed companies to continue operating during times of crisis without having to worry about their services being shut down.

In times of need, offering empathetic, personalized offers and deals will make it easier to retain your customers for the long term. As many studies have shown in 2020 and 2021, the businesses that show empathy to their customers will likely be the ones that survive critical situations. Talking directly to your customers will give you the insights you need to deliver personalized offers. But you can also use things like Big Data and analytics to find longer-term solutions that could strengthen customer loyalty.

Enhance Services with Digital Solutions

During the pandemic, we all learned how valuable technology can be to businesses of all sizes and industries. Telecom companies struggling to manage peak demand turned to enterprise process automation solutions to handle more mundane tasks without human intervention. You may have started investing in more tools equipped with artificial intelligence.

For example, virtual agents and chatbots became an easier way to answer customer questions, both for telecom companies and their business customers. At the same time, digital onboarding and order management solutions ensured that telecom brands could capture important information about customers, improve their service, and automate the onboarding journey with as little stress as possible.

Going forward, a strong focus on digital transformation should prepare modern telecoms for future times of hardship. As you may have discovered over the past few years, these smart and automated solutions can greatly improve your chances of providing fast and efficient service to your customers while keeping costs as low as possible. Some smart solutions even empower team members in the telco environment to do a better job. For example, an efficient chatbot can provide quick and easy access to information for employees serving a customer.

Give Customers More Control

One of the best ways to make sure you are there for your customer without overwhelming your telecom staff is to give them more control. The more support your customer has with things like troubleshooting and dealing with issues, the less stressed they’ll be when waiting for problems to be resolved.

An automated customer service solution can give your customers instant insight into what’s going on with their service or products, so they can decide immediately what to do next. The right solution, like Bulb Tech’s Cempresso solution, can immediately investigate and perform root cause research to determine the reason for a communication issue.

After a potential solution is found, automated self-service and troubleshooting tools can initiate workflows that implement potential fixes on behalf of the customer without contacting a single human employee. Automated solutions reduce the burden on your team and provide your customers with faster access to the tools they need.

Commit to Constantly Listening to your Customers

Perhaps the best way to ensure that you are providing your customers with what they need, even in difficult times, is to listen to them. These days, customers are more than willing to voice their needs, whether it’s in conversations with your sales teams or in reviews of your services. The more you listen to your customers, the more you’ll learn what’s really important to them when they are dealing with things like local disasters, pandemics, and financial problems.

If you already use automated tools and AI solutions to support your team and staff, you can also access these services to gather helpful information. AI tools can determine which issues are most prevalent with your customers and sift through information to identify trends in customer inquiries. Even virtual agents can be programmed to identify things like changes in customer sentiment and common issues during service calls.

Combine the data you collect with your digital tools with the human feedback you get from talking to your customers, and you are more likely to develop a set of services, solutions, and offerings that make a real difference to your customers in times of need. More than anything, most customers just want to know that telcos understand their needs and that they listen to them.

Be There for Your Customers; We’ll Be There for You

Both in times of need and in situations where it’s just business as usual, customer service has never been more important. With the help of Bulb Tech, telcos today can ensure they have all the tools they need to stand out from the competition. Our comprehensive range of automation tools, self-service solutions, automated diagnostics, and AI systems will transform the operations of any telco.

Not sure where to start? Contact the team at Bulb Tech today to learn how we can help you build the perfect customer service strategy.