How communications service providers can invest in customer experience.

Communications service providers (CSPs), despite being at the forefront of the telecommunications industry, have been slow to invest in customer experience. In part, this has been because CSPs have primarily focused on the growth and evolution of their network infrastructure for coverage, capacity, and resilience.

This focus means that CSPs often miss opportunities to provide better service and improve their Net Promoter Scores by providing better service. Here are four key areas that CSPs should consider for investment in improved customer experience:

Lowering the barriers to service

To improve customer satisfaction, CSPs need to reduce the overall net effort for customers in service interactions. In many instances, CSPs simply lack the engagement channels and tools required to empower customers to easily engage.

The ideal customer scenario would be for the CSP to have already anticipated the customer's issue. Using artificial intelligence, the care platform could make an accurate prediction about why a customer may be contacting the CSP for service.

This information could be surfaced to the agent to assist them with the inbound customer query, irrespective of how many channels or agent contacts the customer may need to navigate. The context and details of the query should be memorialized and passed across channels and agents seamlessly.

Deflecting to digital self-service

CSPs can benefit from providing unassisted care features through increased rates of deflection to digital self-service. To do so, companies would need to ensure that self-service is underpinned by comprehensive knowledge management and reinforced with digital assistants that provide a rich, conversational experience. Integration to key applications will allow customers to easily self-serve to address billing, order, buying, and subscriber care queries through the unassisted channels, while also providing contextual transitioning to the assisted channels when needed.

Reinventing the agent...