Zero-touch Customer Service - The Ultimate Payoff From Adopting A Customer’s Eye View Of Service Experience
The boom[1] in video streaming services, video conferencing and gaming has brought the role of fixed-line networks rapidly back to prominence, with higher-than-ever expectations of service quality and customer care.
Telcos worldwide have long labored to improve service quality and reduce the friction of the customer service experience. Yet a vicious cycle of service quality issues compounded by frustrating, multi-touch call centre interactions has left the industry poorly-rated, lagging behind airlines, utilities and even banks in surveys of customers[2].
“Consumers feel exhausted by interactions with telecom service providers.”
But telcos are finally envisaging a very different future of true customer experience management and zero-touch customer service enabled by service quality excellence and smart automation. With the growing influence of data and the advent of sophisticated machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools, the possibility of achieving low-touch and even zero-touch customer service seems finally within reach. And the payoffs for this ambitious goal come early as operators realize incremental, efficiency, cost, and service quality benefits from each step towards smart automation.
“Covid accelerated our drive towards zero-touch and we’re going full-steam ahead.”
The Foundations of Zero-touch Customer Service: True Customer Experience Management
Zero-touch service draws together three streams of automation:
Proactive Service Quality Management
Integration of Customer, Service and Interaction Data
Well-designed Digital Service Channels and Self-service Tools.
Many new technologies are contributing important parts of emerging zero-touch solutions, including cloud computing, data pipelines, machine learning, personalized decision engines, self-service apps and AI chatbots. Operators are already making great strides in piloting and rolling out solutions in streams 2 and 3.
However, Axiros believes the critical proactive service quality stream needs to address a fundamental question: “How can we understand each customer’s unique situation and experience in sufficient detail to achieve zero-touch”?
The answer is by using CPE data to fundamentally change the way operators view their networks – adopting the customer’s eye view, looking from outside-in rather than inside-out.
But what are the challenges that await us here? This will be answered in our next blog article soon. Stay tuned!
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Part 2 of 6 “Complex Challenges At The Network Edge Are The Great Untapped Potential Of TR-069 Data” will follow soon here.
[1] CISCO’s VNI report predicts doubling of connected wireless devices per household will by 2022 to 15-24 in EMEA & US
[2] https://acquire.io/blog/improve-customer-retention-in-telecom-industry/
From this blog series:
Part 2/6
Part 6/6
Part 3/6
Part 4/6
Part 5/6