WHY DO TELECOM PROVIDERS UNDERSERVE THEIR CUSTOMERS?
In the UK, Ofcom has reported that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are underperforming when it comes to customer service. Similarly, in Sweden, the Swedish Consumer Agency has reported poor performance in CSP customer service. Common complaints include difficulty in terminating agreements, hard-to-reach customer care, and unresolved reported problems.
All research today states that you should treat your customers well; otherwise, you face detractors, churn, and lower revenues.
I’ll concentrate on the area where Subtonomy are experts in, namely technical customer service. We did a study of a big outage in a mobile network and only 0,3% of affected subscribers called customer service, I would say that CSPs have a serious service debt to their subscribers.
So why do Telecoms fail when it comes to technical customer service? Here may be the top reasons:
📌 Customer Service is considered a cost center
📌 Underinvestment in tools
📌 Technical customer service is more or less blind; they don’t have proper tools.
📌 When OSS/BSS changes are made, they are primarily done to improve operations or reduce costs for the CSP, not to improve the experience for the customer or customer service.
Would it be difficult to change? The answer is no! Here are a few examples:
💥 Digitize more interactions.
💥 Anything your staff can do with an internal tool could be exposed to your customers through self-service.
💥 Instead of hiding the support telephone number, make it visible.
💥 Invest in tools so customer service can stay on top of things.
Today, the majority will not call technical customer support; instead, they wait it out or try to solve it themselves. Make technical support available in digital channels for self-service and proactively inform your customers. This will increase customer satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. We’ve seen a fourfold increase in engagement with technical customer service when enabling technical self-service. This has been achieved while simultaneously reducing costs. Excellent customer service will benefit your customers, staff, and shareholders.
Subscriber ❤️ Autonomy = Subtonomy
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