CX in Telecom: Managing for Success
The telecom industry is a tough one, and for many businesses, it’s just as hard to keep customers for the long haul as it is to attract them in the first place. There’s one focus that can help you get new customers to sign up for your company and keep them: customer experience.
Of course, having a customer experience strategy is one thing. Actually, enacting that strategy is another. For the latter objective, it’s smart to focus on customer experience management in telecom. Let’s take a closer look.
Customer Experience Management in Telecom Explained
Customer experience is essentially the experience your customers have when interacting with your brand at all touchpoints (e.g., when they see an ad, visit your website, and sign up for a telecom service, etc.). Customer experience management (CEM) is the practice of managing your resources, people, and methods to achieve your CX goals.
For example, say that you want to make sure your telecom company website is smooth, navigable, and intuitive to use. That’s your CX goal. CEM or customer experience management is how you achieve it, such as by:
- Looking through your website and noticing points where people tend to drop off, like slow-loading pages, bad layouts, etc.
- Taking steps to revamp your website for better navigation, such as hiring a web developer.
- Testing the new website repeatedly and further iterating and improving upon it over time.
In the telecom industry specifically, customer experience management means delivering seamless, efficient, and, most of all, effective communication through any means necessary.
Why Is CEM So Important for Telecom Companies?
Telecom companies, perhaps more than any other company type in any other industry, have to deliver quality and speed to their customers.
Telecommunications, by nature, is about sending information from one place to another seamlessly and quickly. When customers sign up for your telecom services, they expect their emails, data, pictures, and any other information to end up where it needs to go ASAP.
In addition, telecom customers expect you to deliver sterling customer experiences from top to bottom. They want to have personalized packages, personalized service, and personalized care at every step of the process.
So, CEM is important for telecom companies because it:
- Helps you draw new customers to your brand. With an excellent CX in telecom, your current customers will be so happy that they will do some of your advertising for you and bring new customers to your brand.
- Helps you keep customers already taking advantage of your services. This is great for your long-term profits and your overall brand reputation.
Without good CEM in telecom, companies tend to struggle to attract new buyers and keep current subscribers. Reputation and service consistency with quality is key in the telecom industry, and solid customer experience management will help you achieve all of that.
What Does Strong Telecom CEM Look Like?
But just what does Strong telecom CEM look like? Depending on the specifics of your company, such as what it offers and your customer base, it can look like a few different things. Here are some examples:
- Very quick, simple onboarding for new customers, especially B2B clients
- Quick and easy installation with few fees and no hassle whatsoever
- Competitive rates for your telecom services and subscriptions
- A wide range of telecom services so that your customers always feel satisfied
- Phenomenal, accessible customer support that is delivered through several different communications channels
- Well-trained staff who always have the answers to customer questions
- A seamless billing and contracting process so customers can control their funds, make payments automatically, and more
- Reliable technical support and communication if there are any telecom outages or other technical problems
That’s a lot of stuff to deliver! But your brand will have to manage it in order to impress its target audience members.
The Benefits of Customer Experience Management in Telecom
There are several important benefits your company may see if you focus on customer experience management in telecom.
For instance, if you address customer concerns through high-quality CEM, they’ll be more likely to stay with your company and remain loyal, even through shifting economic conditions and in the face of strong competitors. Even better, those same customers will be more likely to speak positively about your company to others they know.
That, in turn, can bring even more customers to your telecom company than you ever dreamed. It’s essentially free marketing, with the added benefit that it’s more effective than regular advertisements because people are more likely to try long-term services that are recommended by their friends and family members.
On top of that, CEM in telecom can lead to reduced business costs. Some customers will do your marketing for you, as mentioned above. You’ll have to spend less time and money acquiring new customers when your current customers are much more likely to stick with your brand and spend money at your company for years to come.
How To Improve CEM in Telecom
Good news: there are many ways to improve CEM in telecom.
Measure NPS and Customer Satisfaction
For starters, you’ll want to measure NPS or net promoter score. In a nutshell, this is a rough score of how likely a customer is to rate a brand highly and recommend it to others, like friends and family members. The higher the score, the better. The lower the score, the more likely it is that a current or past customer won’t recommend your brand or, worse, will recommend against your company.
You can measure NPS by sending out surveys to current or past customers at the end of transactions or subscriptions. Be sure to ask other questions to measure overall customer satisfaction, as well. The more information you can gain from your customers, the better equipped you’ll be to solve their direct pain points.
Address Customer Needs and Complaints
After sending out a bunch of surveys and measuring your net promoter score, you’ll probably have a general idea of the most common complaints or problems with your customer experiences. For instance, maybe your website is not navigable, or maybe you don’t offer a self-service portal for telecom subscriptions.
Whatever the case, take a look at the customer needs and complaints you've collected and get to work addressing them. For example, if your customers are constantly let down by service agents, consider revamping your squad and training them to become customer experience agents who can anticipate customer problems and deliver wonderful solutions time and again.
By directly addressing customer complaints and needs, you’ll show that you are improving your experiences for the better. If done properly, you may even reignite interest and confidence in your company for customers who lost it previously.
Optimize NPS Growth
You’ll also want to try to optimize net promoter score growth. The best way to do that? Personalization.
Customers are more likely to look at your brand fondly and recommend it to others if they feel like you pay specific attention to them. You can optimize for a net promoter score growth by:
- Send personalized marketing and discount emails.
- Give longtime customers special loyalty perks or gifts.
- Assign each big customer a dedicated customer experience agent so that they have one consistent point of contact with your company.
All of this can do wonders for making customers more likely to recommend your company to their circle.
Analyze and Iterate
In the long run, the last step is to continually analyze and iterate upon your customer experience goals and methods.
Always measure your NPS and how it evolves. But you should also measure other metrics like churn rate, acquisition rate, customer lifetime value (CLV), and so on. All of this information can tell you whether your customer experience management efforts are successful.
As you learn more information, you can appoint a different manager, change your strategy, or take other tactics to achieve your CX objectives. In the end, your brand will be well-equipped not just to improve customer experiences in the short term but also in the long term.
Contact AwesomeOS Today
Practicing five-star CEM in telecom is difficult, even in the best of circumstances. That’s why experienced, knowledgeable companies like AwesomeOS are the ideal partners to contact.
In fact, our streamlined BPO services can help you achieve your customer experience management goals in more ways than one. Whether that’s helping you gather customer insights, assisting your customer support staff, or training doesn’t support staff to provide stellar experiences from start to finish, we’re ready to start. Send us a message today to learn more.
Sources:
What is Customer Experience (CX) and Why Is it Important? | Tech Target