By: Yaron Gueta

Optimized and innovative user experiences have given OTTs an edge in disrupting telco businesses. Because of the digital-first nature of many of these OTTs, digital customer experiences are a strategic imperative for telcos in order to remain relevant.

Telecom customers are among the most digitalized of all sectors. Both their knowledge and expectations of telcos’ websites and mobile apps are high—and, too often, they’re not met by carriers.

To address the strategic imperative of good digital CX, telcos need to understand the most common customer complaints about their websites and apps—as well as how they can be remedied. Let’s take a look at the top three: lack of e-care, lack of omnichannel customer experience, and lack of personal experiences.

Complaint #1: Lack of E-care

E-care comprises the three most common digital customer service channels, encompassing:

• Live agent chats: Customers talk to a ‘real’ person based in a contact center by typing their messages into an embedded tool on a website, app or social media page.

• Chatbots: The first point of contact for consumers with many leading organizations, chatbots can be used by mobile and web customers as well as by internal support staff to quickly locate relevant product information or to prepare an agent to more quickly resolve a customer’s problem.

• Social Media: This channel includes Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, blogs and more. Customers typically interact with a telco brand through social media by sharing and liking posts, updates, conversations, pictures and videos. This channel is generally only used for customer service purposes when a consumer wants to raise the profile on an issue that the telco has failed to adequately address with live agent chats and chatbots. Of course, the issue is then visible to all followers of the telco on that particular social channel.

Telco customers complain that their carriers don’t invest enough resources into these channels and their optimization. Common complaints center on live agents and the chatbot experience. When live agents aren’t prepared or able to fully address issues in chat conversations, and the conversation must move to additional support via telephone, customers become frustrated. And, chatbots are often criticized as too simplistic, with frequent technical issues and only basic data analytics.

Chatbots occupy an emerging role in the digital CX landscape. With the Internet of Things now present within factories, households, and even cars, chatbot help is more important than ever— especially since these machines now have the ability to talk to chatbots in the form of data itself. The chatbots are able to disseminate the big data that they receive, quickly synthesize the problems found within, and explain it to their human counterparts. Chatbot data analytics can provide quick insights into problems and easily translate them into a format that non-machines can understand. In this digital age—especially within the telecom industry—it is increasingly important to embrace the Internet of Things and the vast array of information it can provide from machine to human.

Best practice recommends using chatbot data analytics in conjunction with customer experience analytics software, as doing so provides carriers with a digital customer journey mapping tool. The combination of chatbot and customer experience analytics can accurately show how consumers are interacting with a carrier’s network, what they are using it for, how long each session lasts, and how strong their signal is. 

These tools are particularly important when examined within a factory setting that has machines sharing information almost constantly. Enterprise customers who are experiencing connectivity or bandwidth problems will report them rapidly, because these issues can impact their business almost immediately. The chatbots are usually the first line responders in this instance, as they are the primary point of contact until the exact problem has been pinpointed for technical assistance.