Leveraging AI in telecoms to enhance offerings and maximise operations

Telecoms.com periodically invites expert third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Kelvin Chaffer, Chief Executive Officer of Lifecycle Software, explores the potential for AI to enable more personalised customer experiences.

Telecom companies across the UK are under mounting pressure to maintain an ever-growing volume of network traffic while satisfying customers with excellent support and superior service offerings. With many facets to excel in, telcos are searching for innovative routes to increase efficiency, improve customer service, and reduce costs – ChatGPT may be the answer to offloading these mounting pressures.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot powered by a complex language model that allows it to emulate human writing. As the use cases and opportunities for AI continue to emerge, there are a host of tech-driven approaches telco leaders can integrate into their operations, utilising software like ChatGPT. Below are some tech-driven approaches telcos can leverage with AI to enhance customer experience and support their operations.

Innovating the customer service experience  

A Deloitte Customer Service Excellence survey suggests that personalised services are the most important factor in driving customer satisfaction. Providing an exceptional, personalised customer experience is invaluable. Satisfied customers can lead to increased revenue and opportunities for upselling, increased brand awareness through WOM, and higher customer retention – just to name a few of the immediate benefits of quality customer service.

The data also suggests that providing various types of self-service options (like that of chatbots) for customers has a positive impact on customer service, yet 40% of the companies that participated in the survey do not provide self-service options. ChatGPT has become particularly well known for its fascinating ability to engage in various conversations. Chat GPT’s adept use of language models allows it to write copy, draft emails, translate the natural language to code – and hold a conversation and answer questions (to name only a few of its language processing capabilities). Telcos can integrate models like ChatGPT into existing customer service chatbots to form ‘super chat bots’ – providing users with a unique, highly conversational customer support experience complete with immediate, relevant answers and a ‘human’ touch.

As consumer needs continue to evolve and digital trends continue to emerge, personalised telco offerings are becoming more paramount than ever. Personalisation is a win-win that benefits the telco and the consumer – a 2021 McKinsey study found that across sectors, companies that integrate personalisation into their offerings well will generate 40% more revenues versus the average, and 45% of consumers actually want to receive relevant offers and information.

So, if the benefits of personalisation are evident, what’s stopping telcos from providing highly-personalised offerings? Nearly 23% of operators feel a lack of technology and data infrastructure is inhibiting their ability to provide targeted services, while almost 33% of operators aren’t sure how to extract value from the data they do get. By integrating AI and models like ChatGPT, telcos can leverage them to analyse customer usage patterns and preferences to make highly personalised product and service recommendations for consumers.

Supporting providers’ offerings and operations

There are many ways telcos can utilise artificial intelligence to support their operations and further enhance their offerings – from optimising network performance to ticket management to fraud detection to even writing code and assisting in software development. Leveraging AI and models like ChatGPT to gather and analyse data and provide effective, automated support frees up telco leaders to focus on the aspects that drive further value for the business.

Models like ChatGPT can be integrated into network monitoring systems to analyse telecoms data and provide real-time, automated insights into customer behaviour and network performance. Optimising network performance allows the telco to maximise ROI, improve user experience, and enhance security. Having the complete network ‘picture’ allows telcos to quickly identify and address any inadequacies end users may be facing, thereby improving the customer experience and maximising their own network’s potential. ChatGPT can also be trained to analyse traffic flows and identify and flag suspicious activity in real-time, potentially curbing fraud and preventing massive financial losses for telcos – by the end of 2021, telcos had suffered a global revenue loss of $39.89 Billion due to fraud.

AI can be implemented and utilised at all organisational levels. Internally, these models can assist with call recording and summarisation and even ticket management – including automating, creating, and routing tickets, even assisting in customer support requests. Fascinatingly enough, ChatGPT can even assist teams with driving software development. With the right prompts, it can write the coding – freeing up software development teams to focus on other aspects of software development like testing and eliminating bugs. This can lead to faster development times, more efficient development processes, and higher-quality coding.

By looking to tech-driven approaches and integrating these emerging technologies into their business models, telcos can significantly strengthen their operations and offerings. Whether it’s creating highly-personalised experiences and service add-ons, automating network monitoring, or assisting development teams – the emerging use cases for AI to support telecoms teams are endless.

Kelvin Chaffer is Chief Executive Officer at Lifecycle Software. With a software engineering background and an ever-growing passion for technology, Kelvin is known for driving growth and innovation in the product portfolio. Kelvin has worked at Lifecycle for 20 years using his positive attitude and tireless energy to inspire and lead Lifecycle’s R&D. 

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