Why is customer engagement still a challenge for telecom operators?

Amazon gets almost 35% of its revenue by engaging its customers through a recommendation engine. Netflix recommendation engine also generates over USD 1 billion per year in revenue. Many businesses have scaled their customer engagement to new heights that transformed into business benefits. But we do not hear a similar success story in telecommunication. Why is it so?

Despite access to the largest pool of customer data compared to any other industry, Telcos tend to be unsuccessful in capitalising on it to enhance customer engagement.

They struggle with low engagement, depleting revenues, and high churn. There have been investments in customer engagement solutions, techniques, talents and strategy, yet there seems to be no end to their misery. So, what is stopping telcos from becoming customer-centric and meeting the dynamic digital-first customer demands?

Where telcos missed taking the right turn

Unlike the digital natives, Telcos found it difficult to phase out the traditional approach as they are heavily invested in legacy systems and traditional processes, so it becomes difficult to break the chain. There have been some progressive investments in data lakes, enterprise-grade software, new age OSS/BSS, but customer-centricity still lacks the required focus. To achieve this transformation, there is a need to bring in a customer-centric solution like customer engagement hubs. Telcos are still using multiple poorly integrated systems to perform a task end-to-end. Telcos use different solutions for customer analytics, campaign planning, campaign intelligence, NBO. Lack of data sharing and reconciling capabilities among these systems lead to the half-baked output. Also, the time lost in the lengthy process delays decision making and poorly designed campaigns. Today’s customers are impatient, demanding and want a holistic, integrated experience specially designed to suit them. Achieving this is not impossible, but telcos need to plan and act accordingly.

Why telcos must invest in the right customer engagement hub

A Customer Engagement Hub is an important element to strengthen the value chain that can transform the telco-customer relationship and directly impact the bottom line. Gartner defines Customer Engagement Hub as an architectural framework that optimally ties multiple systems together to engage the customer. It allows personalised, contextual customer engagement across all interaction channels, whether through a human, artificial agent, or sensors. It helps create an integrated customer experience by connecting multiple siloed functions for a seamless experience.

Customer engagement hubs help fulfil customers’ demand for more personalised, seamless experiences. Customers demand an integrated, seamless experience as they switch between different channels during the purchase journey.

Salesforce’s recent research shows that 75% of customers expect seamless interactions across different departments. 54% of respondents say sales, service, and marketing don’t seem to share information; 83% of customers expect immediate resolution when they contact a business.

As per Mckinsey, operators that have advanced their digital customer engagement will experience the most significant upside.

How to check if your customer engagement hub is the right fit for you

In today’s context, the most important thing is to offer an end-to-end capability for telcos to manage the entire customer engagement from one platform. This reduces operational cost; centralised data access minimises the time for analysis; enable real-time decisioning. Cost-benefit and reduce operational overheads as the operator is just managing a single vendor. Advanced self-servicing AI/ML-driven capabilities to allow business teams to run the platform without any dependency on the technical teams. This is a great capability to promote the citizen data scientist model to create a data-driven organisational culture. Real-time decisioning and execution help telcos in highly personalised, contextual and value-driven interaction with customers.

Easy integration with different systems (upstream and downstream) through APIs. This enables easy data sharing and has a single view of the entire organisation. You can collate diverse customer data points to create a 360-degree customer profile to help you run a segment of one campaign.

Here is a case study of a leading telecom operator that saw significant revenue impact and churn reduction by migrating their legacy systems to Pelatro’s MViva Customer Engagement Hub.

About Pelatro’s MViva Customer Engagement hub

Pelatro mViva Customer Engagement Hub offers an end-to-end solution that creates a foundation for delivering a better, more informed customer engagement experience. It provides clear visibility into the customer’s entire relationship with the telecom operators and enables the marketing teams to be more effective. You can engage the customers at a more holistic level, considering their past interactions, behaviours, needs, and other aspects.

Interested to see a demo of mViva Customer Engagement Hub? Click Here