of companies releasing as little information as they think they can get away with. How we communicate failings with customers is becoming much more important. We must be transparent, always providing the facts on what is happening with plenty of detail.

For example, when we had a fault on the Arelion (then Telia Carrier) AS1299 network in 2016, quite rightly many customers aired their dissatisfaction. On social media, we were very honest about the issue, how it was remedied, and the actions taken to ensure it could not happen again. We lost a few customers because of that event, but most were accepting of our contrition and that openness is remembered. It is not common for carriers to respond like this in our industry, even today, and this needs to change. 

Carriers benefit from raising the CX bar

This may seem like an obvious statement as carriers retain and win new customers through a great CX experience, but it’s not the only benefit. Today, carriers have more real-time knowledge about their own networks than ever before, and the thing that is driving this is the revolution happening in customer provisioning, transparency, and the overall experience. Automation technology, Internet of Things monitoring, new routers, machine learning and artificial intelligence are just some of the technologies that are making it possible to deliver today’s network and customer experiences. Each deployment of these technologies gives carriers new insights into their networks and business operations, enabling features such as preemptive maintenance and automatic fault resolution. It has been the demand for more transparency from customers that has revealed the true value of this data to carriers and customers alike.

The human touch

Making sure the human touch is available to customers when they want it as part of their customer experience is not the only part of the human equation that matters. How carriers organize themselves internally to share experiences and information is hugely important and critical if you are to be responsive to the needs of customers. In the same way that customers want greater transparency over their data, service management needs this data, too. But dashboards bringing data from different systems together are not enough. Today’s leading carriers integrate service management teams with network planning, network operations centers, maintenance, and technical teams. The connections between these teams are an essential component to delivering the best CX.

At Arelion, we collaborate very effectively throughout the organization and work closely with the Service Delivery team and other units within Operations to resolve problems and identify patterns that can inform other areas of the business. It’s almost impossible to put a value on the benefits that we and our customers get from this human touch.

Trust in a great customer experience

Everything in this article can be boiled down to one word: trust. Trust that you can deliver, will be honest, and are responsive to customer needs. The technology, people and processes behind a great customer experience all feed into engendering trust. The old ways of hiding what is happening in the network or operating on a “need to know basis” when it comes to faults are being cast into obscurity. Acknowledging failings and admitting errors is a humbling experience, but one that will lead to personal growth as well as to a better network.

Trust earned through an excellent customer experience is the differentiator in today’s carrier market, and the most likely measure on which a customer will make their buying decisions. This should come as no surprise. The reliance that customers have on connectivity to deliver their own services and products is more important than ever in the post-pandemic digital world. As an industry, we need to raise the bar on the CX that we deliver. There is a lot at stake for customers, and carriers that fail to raise their bar will soon find out that the same is true for them.