28 signs your Telco is about to be disrupted

Disruption is rife. If you’re working in the telecommunications industry, these are the warning signs you shouldn’t ignore.

If you’ve been working within the Telco industry for some time, it’s good practice to frequently step back and gain perspective of the bigger picture.

Here are 28 signs that the Telco company you are in is ripe for disruption, and more specifically, that may hint at an impactful opportunity that lies just ahead for your business:

1. Your Telco talks extensively about being the best network and winning awards for reception and speed. Your customers are unlikely to consider this as much more than simply ‘doing your homework’.
2. Your internal discussions are more about the latest price discounts of your competitors than the user experience of your own customers.
3. ‘The more people in the stores the better,’ right? You totally neglect the fact that most of your customers visit your stores due to issues with your service — not because they are truly interested in your offers.
4. Your Telco opens up new flagship stores — of course, inspired by Apple stores. Unfortunately, they are miles behind when it comes to customer experience.
5. Your Telco is managed as a cash cow, and financial targets are on everyone’s mind. Besides that, there is a lot of talking about customer experience. However, it’s just talking.
6. Your Telco’s openness to failure and its feedback culture is often proclaimed by the management. Yet discussions often end with a statement by the highest-ranked employee in the room.
7. Your Telco’s customer age distribution clearly gravitates towards the 60s. Younger folks very often sign up at ‘must-be minor quality’ MVNOs, clearly due to lacking financial resources even though MVNOs have a far better digital customer experience.
8. Your Telco never experienced its full end-2-end customer experience. “Oh, it takes 6 weeks plus 2 store visits plus 1 call with the call center for our landline internet to activate.”
9. Your Telco’s customer service can be optimized by a better IVR and a better (more complex) logic to steer the caller to a fitting agent, right? Your internal decision framework is all about processes and efficiency for almost any issue.
10. For new ideas, your Telco closely monitors the market, especially your direct competitors. Your customers, meanwhile, would love Apple, Google or Amazon to become a network provider.
11. Your Telco mistakes years of affiliation as customer loyalty. Maybe there is just no better option available — yet.
12. Your Telco’s brand is bold, and this is why customers will always be there. Most likely correct in the past, you shall accept the fact that ‘selling data’ is an absolute commodity. The brands of the present win the customer experience and do not operate the hardware.
13. Your Telco still offers a variety of plans & bundles even though far fewer and much simpler options would be sufficient. However, it’s just way too scary to lose even a single customer who is using any of your many, many products. A portfolio simplification would take away the agony of choice from your customers and help your agents in stores as well as the internal operations.
14. Your Telco’s organization towards the customer is the classic functional silo split into customer channels. Each channel has its own financial targets and KPIs. This also means a separated customer experience for each channel.
15. Your Telco outsourced the most valuable asset: Customer contact. In general, the call center is rather seen as a processing engine than a source of customer insights.
16. With every little IT development, you interfere with a massive IT project that’s been running for years already. After the GoLive, all problems will be solved. Keep dreaming about both, the GoLive and the functionality.
17. Your Telco desperately wants to innovate, but strongly believes that its core assets and entire customer base needs to be involved — making it impossible to start lean and opt-out if an idea does not work.
18. Your Telco wants to be more like a startup, but when inventing new products or services you would rather stick to the well-known business model. Monthly paid subscriptions and long lock-in periods give a sense of security. You just like the bad-revenue-game.
19. Your IT hardly stands a chance against the ancient and complex systems landscape. Countless elimination attempts made everyone sarcastic about even trying.
20. Every year you hear from the management that the company did great, mastered every challenge, made great achievements. From within the operation, you have a different feeling. It remains a mystery.
21. Your Telco is running a program with the goal of unifying the customer experience but ends up adding yet another isolated silo to the customer journey.
22. Your Telco wants to work agile, but your teams mostly engage in Bollywood Scrum: Going through the motions of agile, but not living it. The employees who work in agile teams do so but for only half of their time.
23. When building new services, your Telco is obsessed with operational excellence and catching every possible edge case. As a result, huge resources are used for handling special cases, while only a few resources are used for serving the vast majority of your customers.
24. Your Telco thinks it should start being “more digital”. No one ever agreed on what this actually means, so interpretations range from paperless to automated to actually radically new.
25. Your colleagues who are tasked with creating great customer experiences know a lot about your customers, and communicate this via a PowerPoint within the organization. They never actually leave the building to meet your customers, let alone put themselves in your customers' shoes.
26. Your Telco still thinks customer-centered product development means every mention of one customer becomes a user story.
27. You still hear “But I do not like this” or “But I do not need that” as an argument against your thorough research and empathy development with actual customers — more often than not from managers who are not the target group.
28. Your Telco only shows high interest in their long term customers in case they want to churn.

In case you are looking for a partner that can help you and your Telco to overcome some of the hurdles mentioned above. Feel free to get in contact with us.