Poor ISP customer service is a prime cause of churn. ISPs are swamped with calls from raging customers with slow, jumpy, stuck internet service… Yet, what response does your ISP provide today? Is it an even more annoying VM? Or, are your customers #85 in line waiting hours for your support team – or days for call-backs on issues no longer relevant? Frustration with customer support teams is so severe that legislation proposed in Australia to hold Telco companies accountable for continued poor service.
Next Generation Telco needs a new customer service approach. Tools and technology expectations change for smart, tech-savvy NG customers. Personalization by mentioning a name isn’t enough anymore. Lack of information will no longer be accepted or tolerated. ISPs need to step up to meet the new expectations. Let’s explore how ISPs can meet NG challenges with AI-based data analytics and hyper-personalization for better service and higher ARPU.
Meeting 3 Big Challenges of NG Customer Service
For ISPs like any service-oriented business, customer service is a fundamental driving force of the business. Here are 3 challenges NG Telcos are facing:
1 – Growing Complexity. As technology is evolving, the telecom industry is also becoming complex. Now, ISPs need to manage TV, broadband, mobile, gaming and data services along with the associated hardware. As the number of applications and devices increase, so do the probability of blunders. This increased complexity of home connectivity places tremendous challenges on the Telco operator.
2- Price Pressure. The intense competition and proactive churning in the Telco sector often leads to a price war. Each vendor is continuously striving to provide improved services at the lowest possible price to maintain an edge over its competitors. Churn is a major issue, so operators continually need to maintain competitive pricing and quality for customer loyalty. And that is tough.
3- Challenging Subscribers. As everything has grown, so have the customer’s demands. Now they want quick and reliable solutions for all their problems. Slight negligence of your company can have a far-reaching impact as people take almost every issue on social media. Therefore, it is now quite critical to fulfill all customers’ requirements and maintain positive feedback. ISPs need to meet customers where they are with quick service on media they use.
Turning Customer Service into the ISP’s Direct Link for QoE
Customer Service is your direct contact with customers. However, it’s much more than providing first level support. In enlightened organizations, customer care departments help in understanding what your customers is experiencing and is a direct link to QoE. According to Gartner Group, 80% of your future revenues will come from 20% of your current customers. However, it’s interesting to note the effect of customer retention. From a Bain & Company study, Telco profits skyrocket up 25% to an astounding 95% simply when ISPs work to retain an additional five extra customers over the existing amount.
With the growing complexity of the connected home, Telcos can capitalize on the new challenges to reap benefits for customer service. To deal with all the NG challenges, ISPs not only have to deal with customer unrest. They must understand the specific needs of each customer. Telcos need to quickly discover the root cause of specific issues in the specific environment of devices, apps, services. New personalized, customer-specific connected home data helps in troubleshooting and overall customer care to improve QoE.
The Power of Personalization to Reduce Customer Churn with Better Service
QoE is key to NG Customer Service & Marketing. When the customer care and marketing teams have a good understanding of their customers’ QoE, they can benefit and succeed. Here are two examples of the power of personalization with NG data analytics.
Example 1: Hyper-personalization for NG Troubleshooting. With real-time connected home data on QoE issues like server crashes, gaming update version defects, power outages or faulty devices, customer care teams can provided personalized service and solutions to customers in real-time. They can tailor-fit actions and offers in real-time to improve QoE. By knowing specific habits, needs and profile of their customers, care teams can improve and help NG customers. Get powerful real-time detection of all issues like this with Veego.
Example 2: Hyper-personalization for Proactive Customer Support. Customer Care teams can set alerts to be notified for unusual events in real-time to better support NG customer needs and issues. With real-time alerts, service teams are prepared to help customers upon a new launch of a service, TV show or Xbox game, unusual spikes in the network or malfunctions in a specific region. They’ll get alerts to know earlier about signs of server failure or network choke. Get a head start on real-time event alerts with Veego.
Hyper-Personalization in NG Connected Homes for Higher ARPU
When customer service is good, it creates loyalty and boosts sales. Telco marketing teams also benefit from advanced AI-enabled data analytics. With a personalized customer connectivity fingerprint in every home like Veego, Telcos identify communication bottlenecks, generate upsell and cross-sell opportunities. By monitoring the day-to-day connected home performance to understand the different customer base QoE, Telco marketing teams can be more proactive with personalized offers for expanding broadband, new devices or changes to the home environment like the location of the extender. They can build new AI-enabled processes for hyper-personalized promotion with sophisticated analytics for new personalized customer products with targeted messaging and QoE based personalized usage for higher ARPU.
The perfect CX may not be too far away after all with NG Telco connectivity analytics.
