There is no doubt that the telecom industry is expanding. However, its expansion also means that the average number of customers being a part of their business cycle and the overall customer churn rate is also on the rise, which makes telecom customer service a top-notch priority.
In a typical telecom industry setup, wherein everybody is connected via this vast web family, it becomes absolutely inevitable to sideline the importance of augmenting telecom customer experience. Now, here’s the catch- any telecom giant cannot master this art of enhancing its customer experience with their present and persistent challenges, without understanding and implementing that ‘How it feels to be in your customer’s shoes?’
Among the most prominent challenges they face, which primarily revolve around providing excellent customer experience and improving telecom customers service, the scope to minimise the discomfort is relatively stronger, as compared to other technical difficulties. This can be definitively observed as the biggest telecom giants including Vodafone, Orange, Virgin Media, Airtel, Bell Aliant, MTN, etc., are all hugely dependant on contact center technology to crease out the differences.
The list of top-notch features and customer services which any telecom giant can avail using contact center technology can be summed up precisely in these 7 points.
- Proactive Communications
More than 75% customers prefer being associated with businesses that are willing to be proactive. Proactive customer communications are personalised, delivered at the right time and via your customer’s preferred channel, which can be easily implemented using predictive dialing, outbound calling, email, message reminders, etc. This can also incorporate setting up collections and other customer service applications like appointment confirmations, billing reminders and payment authorizations, service outage notifications and fraud alerts.
- Mobile Connectivity
In today’s fast-paced life, nobody wants to wait, especially your customers. They want their queries to be resolved then and there. No pausing, no waiting, not having to loop back for the next step after 7 days or even an hour later. As a result, business operations need to be re-imagined, giving the customer more control over where, when and how they chose to engage with any business. This can be easily achieved with advancements such as rapid growth of mobile based applications. These applications can be easily used in smartphones, tablets and iPads. They offer a variety of self-help services, and those which aren’t listed can easily be taken care of by getting in touch with customer care reps.
- Customer Insights
Call center technology can very skilfully and appropriately tackle one major roadblock which any business, including telecom industry faces- ‘the big customer data’. As any business builds up, it will eventually have a pool of information – customer statistics. This raw data would need further processing to carefully mark windows and unlock major business opportunities. Most businesses fail to process this valuable asset. This becomes relatively easy and more organised with specialised work-force, who look for opportunities to cross sell, and upsell, just when needed. Merging these two verticals together can revolutionise the telecom industry customer experience.
- Social Media Engagement
There’s a very famous anonymous quote which says that if they aren’t talking about you, you aren’t making enough noise. This quote explains how important it is to be present- physically and virtually. Many telecom providers often ignore the potential social media marketing and engagements offer. This will not only boost your ROI but also help you in leveraging a bigger customer base. Call center reps can be well trained to route traffic via social media channels, which can also add to many self help options available.
- Support complex diagnostic problems
Many a times, there can be major technical issues your customer faces. There can be a situation, where he or she is not able to actually identify the exact problem or the cause. They would prefer and demand human assistance in such scenarios. With contact centers working undeniably 24*7, this issue can be easily taken care of. Now, there can be scenarios where the agent would not be able to resolve the query, but with the aid of knowledge transfer tools and specialized search engines for reps, he can have access to the customer’s query and get them addressed. There can be back-end issues prevailing, network jams etc. but if contact center technology is equipped well to provide excellent customer service experience, it can boost your customer base well.
- Identifying and Prioritizing High Value Customers
It is very important to treat your customers right. And out of the whole pool of customers, there will be a few ‘golden customers’, who would need that extra attention. The big question is how to identify them? This can be easily done using customer markers which is widely used in most of the contact center setups. These markers, help your agents to distinguish the call to action, which is demanded while dealing with them. There can be separate call routes which can be easily set up to ensure that they aren’t hanging up the phone midway, while stuck in queue. These customers are also the ones who add up to your returns heavily. Losing them would not be a good idea.
- Exploring Self-Help Options
Having a contact center can give telecom providers the freedom to empower their customers to explore a variety of self-help options over the IVR. They can easily check their balance information, order bill dispatches, request for a call back and many more things. These are some of the most frequent queries, which can be easily addressed with the endless number of opportunities contact center technology offers.
These are some of the ways of enhancing telecom customer experience. If you have any more suggestions or queries, do let us know in the comments section.
