How Telcos Can Create the Digital Experience Demanded by a New Generation of Customer
- Published
- 3 min reading
Everything now and everything fast – these are the demands of today’s consumers. While over the top players such as Amazon have written their own rulebook in this respect, many telcos struggle to keep pace. In order to do succeed in this endeavor, CSPs need to understand that interaction via digital channels must always be simple, reliable, and near instantaneous. To deliver on this, they need new tools and new approaches. They need to become new generation telecoms.
Putting digital customer experience at the heart of new generation telco strategy
Many telco customers have one interaction with their provider each month: the invoice. Confusing or inaccurate bills stoke frustration, and could cost you customers. This problem can be addressed by implementing digital invoicing and deploying artificial intelligence solutions capable of interrogating vast quantities of invoice data before the final bill ever reaches the customer. The true digital invoice will also let customers drill down into every detail, increasing their confidence in their provider.
If your customers do need to contact you for any reason, they are unlikely to halt their current smartphone activity to do so. This is especially true of “Generation Z” – the telco customers that operators are now wooing. They want to “tap and text” using the channel of their choice; and while telcos already understand that a well-implemented omnichannel strategy can help them meet this demand, they should also be prepared to make the leap to the next level – a channel-less approach.
If your customers do need to contact you for any reason, they are unlikely to halt their current smartphone activity to do so. This is especially true of “Generation Z” – the telco customers that operators are now wooing. They want to “tap and text” using the channel of their choice; and while telcos already understand that a well-implemented omnichannel strategy can help them meet this demand, they should also be prepared to make the leap to the next level – a channel-less approach.
How should telcos create a digital experience to satisfy “Generation Z” customers?
A channel-less customer journey builds on traditional omnichannel by focusing on maintaining a brand’s presence only in the channel a customer is using at a given moment. In BSS (business support systems), with customer self-enablement, personalized recommendations and all the business logic and the data hidden behind the scenes, this approach ensures a consistent and seamless journey. It also simplifies digitization of the customer journey, reducing dependency on a particular application used in the interaction channel. This requires business logic independent of all applications, with channel apps utilizing open APIs which serve access to predefined processes. In addition, business processes must be defined with the correct gradation to assure swift and simple processing in digital channels.
These business processes rely on a robust, catalog-driven (model-driven) approach. This may be most commonly associated with products and services, but in fact the product catalog is not the only catalog involved here. Different domain models drive different business processes. For example, while the creation of a customer record may be orchestrated by the relevant process, the actual data and respective validations are driven from the model. This facilitates implementation of built-in business processes ready to deploy in digital or physical channel apps, while all the models are set up in the system.
Telcos that are prepared to meet the demands of the “always on” generation and adopt some of these modern, customer-centric and channel-less tools, will be best placed to transform into digital service providers - a new generation telecoms - able to innovate at the pace required by today’s market and customers.
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