Mobile and social media adoption have supercharged fraud and identity theft rates and customers have noticed. Thirty-eight percent of consumers said they were concerned about fraud when using their mobile devices. This creates an opportunity — some may say a responsibility — to further solidify trust by embedding personal security tools into the telecom customer experience. A few examples include migrating to passkeys instead of passwords for account access, gifting customers free identity theft protection, and bundling credit or identity monitoring with their telecom services.

Device-based identification: Telecom providers often authenticate customers with challenge questions like mother’s maiden name, address or account number, sensitive data that’s increasingly available to cybercriminals through a rising number of data breaches. Fraudsters can buy this data relatively inexpensively from the dark web and use it to impersonate legitimate customers. What’s more, social engineering and other cybercrime schemes enhanced by AI are getting better and faster at guessing passwords and intercepting one-time passcodes. Device-based data, such as phone type, usage patterns, and length of device ownership, however, is less likely to be stolen or spoofed. Telecom providers that embed device-based identification platforms into the customer experience can more confidently authenticate good consumers while reducing false declines, undue step-up authentication, and unnecessary manual reviews. All of this combines to create safer, “friction-right” customer interactions.

Best Practices for Effective Embedded Strategy

Even as embedded strategy becomes more prevalent, most companies are still in the early stages of developing and executing their plans. Early adopters of the embedded approach have found a few keys to success that others may choose to emulate.

Align with business goals: To avoid innovating for innovation’s sake, growth-oriented telecom providers understand how the embedded solutions they’ve chosen to pursue will advance the holistic objectives of the company.

A goal to modernize the customer experience, for example, is well-aligned with embedded use cases. In a 2023 survey of telecom providers, limited self-service billing capabilities was named as a top challenge. For these companies, solutions the integrate directly with billing platforms make a lot of sense, enabling customers to access their bills, make payments and resolve issues within their trusted telecom app and on their own timeline.

Commit to customer-centricity: A successful embedded strategy prioritizes the customer experience. Telecom providers that take the time to gather and analyze customer behavior data leverage those insights to design and, importantly, prioritize the experiences most likely to solve pain points or enhance engagement. If a significant volume of customer service calls is due to forgotten passwords, for instance, strategists may choose to accelerate the integration of device-based identification platforms over the other embedded initiatives they are considering.

Maintain focus on security: Like all tech-enabled capabilities, embedded strategy will continue to evolve rapidly alongside the IoT, AI, and data analytics solutions that underpin them. Telecoms that prioritize privacy and security have policies and procedures in place to ensure strong protections are in place, both at the outset and as new integrations come on board. This is not only to safeguard the company against the steep financial losses associated with cybersecurity incidents; it is also to mitigate reputational risk. Although consumers do their best to protect themselves against fraud and identity theft, they expect the companies they do business with to shoulder some of the burden, too. In fact, a 2023 survey of mobile phone customers found that consumers view their mobile phone carriers as the most responsible party for helping them protect against mobile device fraud. Regardless of age group, survey respondents consistently held carriers to higher account than Big Tech, ISPs, and device manufacturers, as depicted in in the chart below.

Becoming a Telecom of Choice in a Crowded Market

A telecom provider that weaves relevant, personalized lifestyle solutions into its services can help keep day-to-day decisions and tasks easy, intuitive, and accessible for customers. The approach can elevate the provider to a telecom of choice in an oversaturated telecom marketplace, positioning the company as a partner that helps customers meet the complex needs of modern life.