Summary:

• Telecom businesses are facing a significant onus to digitally revamp their customer experiences
• Cohesive audience analytics can assist in identifying ideal potential customers
• Automation and segmentation are game-changers on the roadmap to telecom digital transformation

The telecom industry is undergoing a complex metamorphosis. As multiple key players have implemented significant digital transformation initiatives, their efforts have made waves across the industry and catalyzed radical changes in the landscape.

After the media industry, telecom is likely to experience the largest digital disruption, as user-centric technologies permeate every aspect of the customer journey. 

Deploying an ideal digital transformation strategy is crucial in keeping a telecom business ahead of the competition curve. Moving forward, let’s take a look at three key objectives telecom businesses should aim to achieve through their digital transformation roadmap. 

Data-driven audience analytics

To deliver data-driven, successfully personalized customer experiences, a robust audience analytics framework is key. 

Telecom businesses must focus on consolidating customer data scattered across multiple sources into a single database, all while ensuring compliance with privacy laws and regulations. 

The benefit? Doing so will lead to a unified, secured customer view across touch points. It empowers sales, marketing, and other customer-centric departments in the telecom business to reduce guesswork and optimize resources through smart decision making informed by evolving, real-time analytics. Telecom businesses that mine customer behavioral and interaction data for insights tend to outperform their competitors who don’t.

By effectively utilizing their customer data, telecom companies also stand to achieve better results with new product rollouts.. As voice calls and texts become ever more affordable, telecom businesses must seek out new avenues for revenue generation. However, that brings a new question to light.

How to identify ideal potential customers?

By consolidating the wealth of customer data available—through tools such as a powerful customer data platform, the telecom business can build highly precise audience segments, paving the way for further analysis.

Digitize order management

Reliance on digital transactions alone are insufficient nowadays. With rising customer expectations, telecom businesses should provide a transaction experience that is streamlined, accessible, and convenient.

To achieve this, they need to pair their customer data management capabilities with technology that can automate communications. They can also offer self-service portals where customers can easily access end-to-end services and explore the full range of products available. 

These portals should be conducive to a seamless order management flow—from the initial capture of service requests, to KYC processes, and finally to billing and payment.

A significant number of telecom businesses have launched full-fledged apps that assist customers in their purchase journey. The core approach is to offer the right product bundle at the right price and time, based on each customer’s past consumption behavior, among other factors. 

The adoption of such apps as part of the customer journey will reduce service costs and churn risks, all while optimizing the ROI of the telecom business.

Provide a unique customer journey 

Customers are expecting more from brands in terms of personalized experiences. 

The challenge in providing such experiences is that customers today are interacting with brands across multiple devices. Consumers expect to be recognized across any number of channels they prefer, and it is critical that their experiences are contextualized by their past online and offline interactions with the brand. 

Telecom businesses need to undergo a paradigm shift from treating customer experience as a chain of unrelated exchanges to something more holistic. AI and machine learning, embedded into the right solutions, allow the telecom business to consistently orchestrate, automate, analyze, and optimize individual omnichannel customer journeys as they evolve. 

AI and machine learning-empowered systems enable businesses to adjust their engagement with each customer based on their shifting behavior and profile in real time.

The way forward for telecom

As they undergo significant digital transformations to stay ahead of the curve of their industry, telecom brands will have to bid farewell to legacy approaches, processes, and cookie-cutter tools. Maintaining a focus on critical aspects such as data-driven analytics, digitized order management, and a unique customer journey will lay the foundation for a successful roadmap.