In 2023 we predicted that 2024 would be the year AI transforms from a buzz word to a business tool, as it became increasingly embedded in operational processes. We also predicted the significant shift towards digital autonomy and proactive care – with operators giving customers more power, control and choice over their own experiences. A trend we said would be fuelled by the evolution and adoption of AI into the customer support layer, with operators working to deliver smarter chatbots, AI-driven insights, hyper-personalized experiences and more. As 2024 draws to a close, Subtonomy’s experts got together to predict the next key trends likely to shape the telecoms customer support market in 2025.
#1 TELECOM CUSTOMER SUPPORT TREND IN 2025
Customer obsession will continue to ramp up
Our key trend in 2024 was the shift from customer centricity to customer obsession, and in 2025 there’s no sign of this trend abating any time soon.
When does an operator become “customer obsessed” rather than just customer-focused? The answer is that customer obsessed organisations take things to a new level of intensity - transforming their businesses through profound customer understanding, engagement, and empowerment.
Their focus shifts from acquiring new customers to creating long-term relationships that continue to deliver value. This means understanding the entire lifecycle of customers – nurturing, supporting and anticipating their needs while prioritizing customer satisfaction and retention. Customer obsession isn’t a goal, it’s a way of life and we expect this trend to continue to grow and bear fruit over the next few years.
PRO TIP: Data is the raw fuel of any customer obsession strategy. This includes data about what your customers experience, prefer, feel, need and want. An essential first step is therefore to bring data together to make the picture of an individual customer’s experience more complete and to increase its usability. As the use of AI evolves, having an accurate dataset becomes even more important as the basis for AI / ML initiatives and for facilitating intelligent operation.
#2 TELECOM CUSTOMER SUPPORT TREND IN 2025
5G monetization will be empowered by network data and facilitated by the call center
As operators bring their data together, breaking down data silos and barriers between departments, the true power of data will be realized across the business. Insights gleaned from network data will be used to craft products to meet customers' real needs and wants, and support precision marketing based on customer context and usage.
As the call center transitions from being a crisis center focused on solving problems as quickly as possible, to an experience hub focused on supporting the overall customer experience, agents will have a critical role to play in ensuring customers are on the right packages, are offered the best products to meet their needs and so on.
PRO TIP: The call center’s transition to becoming an experience hub will be powered by the introduction of intelligent co-pilots. These co-pilots will ensure the agent has all the information they need at their fingertips and even suggest next-best actions.
As the time to resolve the initial inquiry is minimized, more time can be dedicated to true customer care – checking the customer is happy, on the right package, and that their equipment is playing its part in delivering a great experience. This might include performing quick, automated optimization of handsets, checking that outdoor units for FWA connections are attached to an uncongested cell and so on. The key is to go beyond the initial inquiry or complaint to ensure the customer is enjoying the best experience possible – pre-empting any problems that might lead to churn.
#3 TELECOM CUSTOMER SUPPORT TREND IN 2025
Channel blending will replace omnichannel
Omnichannel is a vision of customer service that sees all channels harnessed together to deliver seamless support. But another step beyond this began to emerge in 2024 and will burst fully onto the customer support scene in 2025. This is the ability to mix self-service technologies and human support in every channel as appropriate. The TM Forum report Humanizing AI: putting people at the heart of customer experience, revealed one example of the blending of human and AI - explaining how chatbot technology could be used to engage queuing customers to solve their problem even before they reached a human agent. While we’re all familiar with the process of escalating a call to a human agent if a chatbot can’t fully resolve a customer’s issues, the reverse is also true. Blending AI with human agents means agents can pass customers back to virtual agents if they need information or support that the virtual agent is trained to handle, freeing the human agent to focus on customers who need their skills.
PRO TIP: Operators need to prepare for a more dynamic use of AI assistants and human support – inserting human agents where they deliver most value into support sessions and using AI for routine tasks where the focus is predictable and requires efficiency. Agents should prepare customers for these transitions by explaining that a virtual agent will handle the remaining transactional steps – like guiding them through the adjustments they need to make to an outdoor unit, booking an engineering call, or buying a product that will make their lives easier. The human agent might even ‘reappear’ at the end of this process to sign off the call and ensure customers don’t feel confused or abandoned.
#4 TELECOM CUSTOMER SUPPORT TREND IN 2025
Customer service agents will be the orchestrators of experience
Someone has to be responsible for the overall support experience and oversee the use of AI. Rather than fearing the introduction of AI, operators need to communicate to their agents that they will have a valuable role to play and will need to upskill in order to perform it.
As orchestrators of support experience, human agents need to become agile at using all the tools at their disposal to deliver an efficient, effortless, holistic and engaging experience to customers – intervening if customers need more help, and using AI to support mundane or transactional tasks. The role of care agents and CX professionals will slowly begin to transform from stressed problem-solvers to a more strategic role that builds deeper customer relationships, ensures every call to care leaves the customer satisfied, and ultimately builds greater loyalty.
PRO TIP: Operators will need to invest not just in technology to support their customers, but also in reskilling their workforces. Agents will evolve into AI prompt engineers and strategists – using their insight into customer problems to create new AI-driven solutions. Thus, in future, operators will need to be both customer obsessed and workforce-enabled, creating new, interesting jobs for problem-solving employees.
#5 TELECOM CUSTOMER SUPPORT TREND IN 2025
The telecoms industry will refocus on ROI
As investments in new technology soar, it’s natural for businesses to question if hype justifies the investment. Traditionally, business cases were made on the basis of quantifiable gains compared against costs for (fairly) immediate or, at the very least, predictable returns. But the return on AI investments, for example, is often not as easy to quantify as traditional business cases require, or may take longer to realize.
As Gartner points out: “…calculating the value of new investments in GenAI requires you to build a business case by simulating potential cost and value realization across a range of GenAI activities”.
Benefits arising from intelligent self-service, routine task automation, and predictive analytics have a profound impact on both the customer experience as well as the long-term business health of the operator – including happier customers and employees that are less likely to churn, as well as better business decision-making. These benefits amplify and accumulate over time, contributing to long-term business success.
If operators overfocus on cost savings, they risk not being able to make a clear business case for AI investment - slowing their intelligent transformation and evolution towards new business paradigms. Such an approach also undervalues the wider range of soft returns that AI delivers, the cumulative effect across multiple KPIs, and the benefits across the entire business (rather than one or two operational silos).
PRO TIP: While it’s really important to focus on business benefits from investment in AI, or any other technology, investment in AI can require substantial upfront investment, making the initial cost prohibitive for smaller operators. And while it promises long-term savings and cumulative gains from performance improvements, making the business case can be challenging. This is where software-as-a-service (SaaS) can be your friend because innovation is delivered on an ongoing basis as part of the service and the most complex ROI calculations (eg AI development and maintenance costs) are handled by your SaaS vendor – you just pay the subscription fees.
#6 TELECOM CUSTOMER SUPPORT TREND IN 2025
The long tail of operators will move to catch up with the customer support comets
Some operators invested heavily in getting the data layer right – working on data quality, bringing their data sources together, and making access to that data easier – which fuelled their journey into automation and AI-enhanced operation. But trailing behind these customer support comets is a long tail of operators at a less mature stage of evolution.
These operators face a diverse range of problems, but also want to catch up with category leaders - driven by the increasing demands of their customers and the need to meet their expectations. The challenge is for them to accelerate their performance so they can compete with trail blazers who might be bigger, more advanced or have deeper pockets. The good news is that this long tail of operators will begin to evolve their customer service more rapidly in 2025, as they learn from the experience of cutting-edge operators and as more pragmatic tools, solutions and approaches come to market.
PRO TIP: No matter where you are in your customer support evolution, Subtonomy has a range of practical tools to help boost your performance, provided on a SaaS basis. We blend cutting-edge technology with user-friendly applications to break down barriers, streamline and future-proof telecom operators’ businesses. We empower telecoms innovation and operational excellence by freeing network data and non-disruptively providing access to it from ONE place. Find out how here about how Subtonomy can help you accelerate towards world-class customer support without the need to swap out underlying systems or network equipment.
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