According to studies and analyses of what makes a company successful or unsuccessful, good customer service is among the most important success criteria. This is because a company’s service to its clients reflects the quality of its products or services.
According to studies, most consumers have negative experiences with customer service representatives from companies in the telecommunications industry, which is home to some of the worst customer service organizations in the world.
Statista predicts that by 2025, the number of mobile phone users will have surpassed 7.4 billion and that global telecommunication spending will reach about 1.6 trillion USD by 2026. Forecasts indicate that the American region’s end-user expenditure on telecom services will grow faster from 2020 to 2024.
As a whole, the telecom industry grew during the pandemic. This has led to additional challenges in interacting with customers and quality control to date. To help telecom firms succeed, we have compiled a list of the top 5 obstacles they encounter, along with creative solutions:
Top Customer Support Challenges in Telecommunication
1. Lack of Customized Solutions
A major issue with global customer support in the telecom sector is the need for tailored solutions. Customized solutions to address customers’ unique concerns or questions are often necessary.
However, offering customized solutions while maintaining service becomes difficult because of the complexity and volume of telecom services. Customers may feel underserved or frustrated due to this limitation, which might affect their overall satisfaction levels, especially if they are from South East Asia.
Overcoming this Challenge
The communication requirements of each client are unique. Therefore, telecommunications providers in Asia must maintain constant communication with customers, analyze their usage habits, and provide personalized plans to meet this intrinsic demand.
Instead of focusing on ARPU (Average Revenue Per User), telecom businesses (Telcos) could actively transfer clients to plans that better suit their needs. Customers will feel more valued and loyal to the company as a result of this enhanced approach to telecom customer service.
2. Rising Digital Customer Service Demand
Smartphones, tablets, and laptops have become more popular among consumers in South East Asia due to technology advancements in recent years. New customer communication norms have emerged due to the shift in consumer behavior, with an increasing customers expecting assistance through digital media.
Telecommunications businesses are in danger because billions of customers worldwide want more digital services in terms of global customer support. As a result, the telecom business needs digital customer service that is both quick and useful.
Overcoming this challenge
Telecom firms can strengthen consumer communication and overcome this challenge through digital transformation.
A powerful omnichannel support system may greatly improve customer service accessibility by integrating digital communication channels, including social media, mobile apps, email, and live chat.
Also, chatbots and AI can make it easier for customers to talk to businesses by immediately answering frequently asked questions and helping with technical issues. These AI-powered solutions make things run more smoothly by reducing reaction times and giving humans more time to deal with tougher situations.
3. Protecting Personal Information
Large service providers in Asia have the confidence of their customers and often have access to sensitive information. This includes addresses, photographs, credit card numbers, and identification documents.
Every business, but notably telecoms that offer a wide range of communication services, must have cutting-edge security measures to ensure their customers’ private information remains private and secure. It should be one of the critical things in the SLAs. The repercussions could be devastating if sensitive customer information is stolen through even a little security hole in a company’s system.
Overcoming this Challenge
Due to this issue, having the most secure systems that can resist cyber-attacks while protecting customers’ privacy is necessary for every organization, notably telecom corporations. Using top-tier, GDPR-compliant, protected global customer support software to protect your database and customers is the best method to guarantee system security.
4. Lack of AI Integration
The key to winning over clients and earning their trust is to be a technologically advanced firm. Not only do the majority of customers favor multi-channel communication, but they also anticipate that it will be supported with AI capabilities that will simplify the service process.
According to Forrester, 60% of consumers are content with chatbot service as long as a human can be accessed if necessary.
Without AI, telecom businesses may struggle to provide adequate customer service compared to their AI-enabled competitors, potentially leading to unhappy consumers and failure to maintaining services.
Overcoming this Challenge
Telecom firms can tackle this problem by introducing a smart customer communication solution powered by AI. This solution will allow customers to self-serve and automate customer care management.
One successful tactic is to use chatbots that are driven by AI and equipped with NLP capabilities. With the help of these chatbots, consumers may get quick answers to common questions and be led through simple troubleshooting steps.
Also, they need to go from automated to human-assisted support with ease so that even the most complicated problems can be escalated to human agents when needed. It can also be one of the major KPIs in the telecom business.
5. Low Level of Employee Involvement
Many departments within telecom firms include marketing, network, administration, credits, collection, verification, and human resources. In contrast to customer service and sales, several departments need more contact with the company’s clients, which telecom needs to do sufficiently.
Maintaining constant communication between these departments and their respective clients is essential. Without this, there will be no grasp of the customer’s viewpoints and problems.
Overcoming This Challenge
Fostering a customer-centric culture at all levels of the business is crucial. It helps in addressing the issue of low employee involvement in customer-centric departments inside telecom firms. Everyone in the company, no matter their position, needs to pitch in and help build a customer-centric culture.
Telecommunications firms should establish a consistent training program emphasizing communication and customer service abilities. Also, setting up lines across various departments will do the job.
The telecom firms can also implement an integrated customer relationship management (CRM) system, allowing various departments to access and update client information along with maintaining services on an individual level.
A Social Media Sentiment Analysis for Improving Saudi Arabia’s Telecom Services
Introduction:
Here we take a look at how the Saudi Arabian telecom industry analyzed consumer feedback in Q1 2022. Opinions shared on Google products such as Maps, Play, and Twitter are all part of the research. The study used SVM classification to get an 88% success rate in predicting the polarity of sentiments.
Discovered Challenges:
Several elements that have a detrimental impact on Saudi Arabian telecommunications services were uncovered through thematic analysis. Problems with service quality that came up in consumer reviews on various social media sites were a major challenge.
Proposed Solutions:
In light of the results, suggestions were made to assist telecommunications service providers in raising the standard of their service and maintaining services continually. The end goal was to overcome the challenge of poor service quality to make the customers happy and satisfied.
Using support vector machine (SVM) algorithms along with theme analysis, the team could fully understand how customers felt. This led to a list of specific ways the telecom company could use to maintain service they offer. The suggestions are meant to help global customer support providers improve their services.
Results:
The Saudi Arabian telecom sector finally saw major improvements in customer feedback due to their better machine learning capability. The sector promises to grow better in machine learning and customer sentiment analysis efficiently.
Wrapping Up
In a nutshell, nothing is more important than giving outstanding global customer support when you are part of the telecom business. This is because rules and standards are always changing due to digital revolutions.
Telecom companies must fix the abovementioned issues to keep up with the competition and satisfy their customers. Demands for digital help, data protection, AI integration, staff participation, and custom solutions are a few examples.
In the conclusion of Saudi Arabia’s social media sentiment analysis, we clearly understood the need to listen to customers. This is an important KPI for maintaining service and better quality control. the need to listen to customers to enhance service quality.
Telecom companies can better understand their capabilities and limitations with the help of in-depth industry research and machine learning. By prioritizing customer satisfaction, the telecom industry can dramatically increase its global customer support quality, improve its KPIs, and see major growth in the evolving digital world!
Author: Greg.B
Executive with 25 years of proven success in call center management and revitalizing business units. Proven career record of producing multimillion-dollar profits through pinpointing operational inefficiencies and encouraging the revitalization of employee morale and corporate culture change.