2 - Automate or perish

That consistency may require the occasional removal of the human element, so often the weak link is in meeting customer expectations.

That’s no slight against humans. Some of my favorite people are humans. But process automation can help make customer interactions more consistent, more helpful, and more fruitful.

Glen Post, CEO of CenturyLink, touted the results the company was seeing from automation in a quarterly earnings call. “We are simplifying and automating products, processes, and systems,” he said. “We are increasing digitization of end-to-end service delivery platforms, allowing more efficient customer-friendly interactions. And we're improving our managed service delivery and service model to enable us to better meet our customers' needs.”

Automation can also help figure out ways to make interactions with customers more profitable, in a very direct way. In a recent entry on Adobe’s blog, Jamie Brighton talked about the benefits of auto-allocation tools that A/B test multiple messages and automatically reroute traffic to the best-performing experience in real time. At any given time, 20 percent of the traffic is A/B tested while the remaining 80 percent is routed to the optimized message.

The example he used was Swisscom, where they found that when they used a silver iPhone as the default image on their product details page, their conversions increased by 37 percent over the gray iPhone they had been using. Will that one small change redefine their business? No. But it is an example of insightful feedback, analyzed in real time and used to make a smart business decision.  

3 - Leverage AI…intelligently

One example of automation that is currently being heralded as the solution to an improved customer experience is AI, and it’s finding its way into every aspect of CSP operations.

For example, T-Mobile (USA) announced last month that it was working with Tupl to automate a key portion of its customer interaction using Tupl’s Automated Customer Care Resolution (ACCR) tool. The tool provides CSRs with detailed, easy-to-interpret cause reports and technical resolutions, allowing them to quickly and efficiently serve customers. Tupl claims the tool is 100 times faster and 4 times more accurate than legacy resolution methodologies, and that it can provide automation levels up to 90 percent.

“At T-Mobile, we’re obsessed with the customer experience,” said Brian King, T-Mobile’s SVP of Technology Service Delivery & Operations, in a statement, “and Tupl’s tool has enabled us to respond to our customers much faster on technical issues. Solutions like this help make T-Mobile #1 in customer satisfaction in US wireless.”

SK Telecom, meanwhile, announced recently that it is moving its AI network operating system, “TANGO,” into the field. The system is designed to detect traffic patterns, potential faults, and a wide array of other data and optimize the network accordingly. In addition, the system is designed to find network anomalies and alert specialized managers to the problem, recommending corrective action whenever possible. In addition to using the system internally, SK Telecom has entered partnerships with carriers such as Bharti Airtel to deploy the technology.

These are just two examples of AI's powerful potential. AI can also be used to plan networks, identify churn risk, handle direct customer inquiries, and more. There’s a risk that these technologies could be overused—notice that both of the examples I used above involve hand-off to humans at some point in the process—but there’s no doubt that AI can solve its share of problems.

These three examples are just the beginning. We could as easily make a list of five or twelve or 20,000. But the main takeaway is that the time for implementing some strategy--any strategy--is now. I am sick of being a churn risk. It would be nice to find a CSP that acted like my boring money was worth earning.