How AI Can Unlock Improved CX and Loyalty in Telecoms

No organization can afford to allocate resources toward initiatives that fail to improve customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. But often, that's exactly what happens. That's because, for too long, knowing which factors influence satisfaction and other key outcomes has remained a mystery.

That's left brands relying on incomplete data, gut instinct, and trial and error to attempt to optimize experiences. Companies have been operating in the dark, unsure what's really affecting the customer experience, for better or worse. And that doesn't have to be the case.

Why AI Is Essential for Elevating the Telecom Customer Experience

Thanks to advanced artificial intelligence techniques, brands now have the chance to tap into powerful tools capable of sifting through billions of data points from channels across customer touchpoints to explore what really impacts loyalty, churn, and overall experiences.

In fact, at this very moment, innovative telecom brands are turning to AI to understand the overall customer journey and pinpoint the exact steps that can and should be taken to optimize the customer experience (CX) and enhance loyalty over time.

Uncovering Your Customer Truth to Inform Innovations That Accelerate Digitization and Enhance Customer Satisfaction

As you read this, your customers are telling you how they feel, what they want, and how they can be better supported — whether that's via social media, customer service surveys, or other channels. This direct and indirect customer feedback can be your brand's super power, if you listen to it, analyze it, and act upon the insights you discover.

Reading between the lines of what's being said will allow your team to not only measure sentiment and pinpoint customers' most pressing challenges, you'll also realize what you can do to make things better for your customers, both in the moment and in the future.

With AI-powered text analytics backed by machine learning, it's now possible for companies to automatically summarize and analyze all of their customer comments at scale, grouping this information into topics and sentiments. By mining all of these inputs — emails, support calls, ratings, and other customer communications — organizations can easily detect trends and issues as they're happening and get to the root cause of common issues, such as a simple website error that's behind repeated inbound calls.

Instead of spending valuable time reading through millions of customer comments, your employees can instead focus on translating these insights into action.

The Empathy Advantage

With the telecom industry up against narrowing profit margins, personalization is the new competitive advantage.

Picture two distinctly different customers: One is shopping around for alternative providers while the other is your company's biggest fan. If you could, your company would interact with these two individuals in highly tailored ways, right?

That's the potential of AI, and that's why brands are using it to both assess sentiment and the customer experience to date as well as to anticipate future customer outcomes, such as to predict which individuals are at risk of churn and to inform interventions designed to boost engagement.

Bringing together all of the information you have about your customers as well as real-time behaviors and actions gives you the ability to create more effective segments, ensuring you address the specific concerns of those who may be lapsing while providing opportunities to further engagement among promoters.

Understanding customers in the aggregate is only the first frontier. The next level is this kind of 1:1 understanding. Too often organizations end up with a one-size-fits-all approach to CX that can't distinguish whether customers are loyal, lapsing, first-timers, or struggling.

By sorting through thousands of customer comments from web surveys and comment cards, one global brand found a critical opportunity for growth, the chance to recognize customers and deliver a more personalized service. The company initiated a pilot solution, trained staff at a test location, and offered guidelines for gathering relevant insights about customers, such as past interactions with the brand. Data from the initial experiment found that the site outperformed a control group by 13% for scores of the staff and service experience.

The Time to Act Is Now

Given our new reality — where one poor experience can damage customer relationships beyond repair — not picking up on key signals of preferences at the aggregate and individual level is simply not sustainable.

Even brand advocates won't stick around if the customer experience isn't up to par. Almost 60% report that they will stop doing business after a poor experience if they can switch to a different company that offers a better experience.