Humanizing customer interactions in Telecommunications

Customer experience has been an area of prime importance in the telecommunication industry. With a growing number of communication service providers (CSPs) and formidable incumbents in the industry, Telcos should be focusing on differentiating themselves to gain competitive advantage. With this intent, CSPs are migrating to become DSPs (Digital service providers) to deliver variety of non-voice services, enabled through digital platforms and partner ecosystems and to provide a hassle-free, interactive customer experience (CX) with a personal touch for better customer retention. Conversational AI proves to be the technology that must be adopted by the telecommunication industry, to develop chatbots and intelligent virtual assistants (IVAs) to enhance the CX. Conversational AI, at its best, mimics the end result and the experience that would have been otherwise delivered by a human. It goes beyond rudimentary chatbot responses which work with simple keyword matching, to understand, process and respond to human language with intelligence.

Traditionally, telecom customer queries are answered via USSD codes, interactive voice responses (IVR) and conventional chatbots deployed by the service providers. These methods are used primarily to automate responses to queries of basic level such as checking balance, starting and stopping of service, and account information. It redirects customers a lot in the process and hampers the customer experience, especially when all they need could be a quick response/simple solution.

How can Conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) improve the CX?

1) Sophisticated understanding of the queries

Conversational AI employs Deep Learning & Natural Language Understanding that trains the bots to handle level 2 and 3 inquiries by the customers. The bots are well-equipped to understand sentences rather than words to recognize the customer intent better and serve them. For example, when a customer raises a query to the IVA, to get his internet settings configured, the IVA will navigate the customer with real-time video instructions projected on his/her screen. It has been observed that nearly 85% of query resolution can be achieved by using conversational AI bots.

2) Personalization

With the aid of cognitive machine analytics and deep learning, over a period, the bots can recognize the need of the customers and suggest personalized services with incentives to avail. It will also help in cross-selling and upselling of services to the customers.

With sentiment analysis being possible by machine learning, the bots to a large extent, can analyze the moods of the customer and handle them accordingly. For example, if a bot senses the customer’s text or voice to sound positive, it will use this opportunity for product recommendation and sales conversion and similarly when it finds the customer to use a negative tone, it will escalate the issue and transfer to a live support agent.

3) Multichannel Convenience

With customers wanting inter-compatibility across platforms, these bots could be made omnipresent and accessed on any platform from websites and social networking sites to messengers and mobile apps.

4) Multilingual Assistance

When a customer interacts with the bot’s voice interface in his/her native language, the bot can auto-detect the language using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and converse in the customer’s language which in itself gives a personal touch to the customers.

5) Zero-wait time

Instant availability of human agents will be a constraint during peak hours and when there are high call volumes leading to longer customer wait time which results in customer frustration. In such times, inquiries of customers take longer time to be answered or go unanswered. With these IVAs, an immediate response could be provided for the customers, increasing their satisfaction.

Over and above the previously mentioned value propositions offered by conversational AI under the purview of customer experience, IVAs can be beneficial for Telcos in the following ways:

Reduction in customer support cost and enhancing the productivity of the employees

With many millions of customers, there must be a large number of customer support personnel deployed by the Telco. Despite this, it is difficult for them to keep track of all queries and resolve them. With repetitive and common inquiries being handled by the IVAs, employee efforts, boredom can be reduced and made more efficient. This will boost the employee morale by releasing their bandwidth for doing more value-added work which in turn will enhance the employee experience. Almost 30% of cost reduction in customer support can be achieved by using IVAs.

Gathering data and preferences of the customers

IVAs are capable of aggregating customer data to build customer profiling by being connected to their devices and analyzing their account details. This will help the Telcos to come up with bespoken value-added services. These IVAs are GDPR compliant and ensures end-to-end encryption for customer data privacy.

Predictive maintenance and support

Being integrated with back-end systems and using data-driven machine learning, IVAs can also monitor, anticipate glitches and proactively fix the problem in real-time avoiding downtime of services to the customer.

The COVID pandemic has led to an unprecedented surge in data traffic, expediting the need for Telcos to digitize customer handling for a seamless experience. By incorporating advanced NLP & Machine Learning technologies, and developing extensive scripts within the IVAs, a telecom service provider can humanize the customer interactions to transform the customer experience.

References
1) Nair, A. (2020, December 18). Why do Telecom companies need Intelligent Virtual Assistants: https://blog.yellowmessenger.com/resources/articles/why-do-telecom-companies-need-intelligent-virtual-assistants/
2) Bika, N. (2020, July 13). Telecom Transform Customer Experience: https://acquire.io/blog/chatbots-in-telecom/
3) Churchill, L. (2020, December 20). 4 Areas where AI Is Transforming the Telecom Industry: https://techsee.me/blog/artificial-intelligence-in-telecommunications-industry/
4) Humanizing Telecommunications: Ring in record growth with Intelligent Virtual Assistants. (n.d). Kore.ai: https://kore.ai/solutions/industries/telecom/