How about giving customers a better experience?

Telecoms.com periodically invites third parties to share their views on the industry’s most pressing issues. In this piece Orla Power, Head of Marketing for Brite:Bill (an Amdocs company) explores some research into CSP customer expectations and what can be learned from it.

Mobile operators and the telecoms industry in general have never been known for excellent customer service and for many that’s an understatement. However, as generations Y and Z start paying for their own telecoms services, a new type of customer with different preferences and expectations is entering the market place.

We have found that this has presented operators with an opportunity to reset the customer relationship with these new customers. Typically, generation Y and Z are service- oriented customers who are willing to change providers frequently and will do so if they are not having a good experience. In addition, they want to interact in ways that suit them, utilising all available channels. They value increased personalisation and being recognised as an individual with specific preferences.

This is all very different from the traditional telecoms approach of communicating via traditional monthly – most likely paper – bills and offering a call centre interaction for those who are prepared to wait. Now, the interaction is multi-channel and much more aligned to the rapid resolution of customer issues and desires.

Yet, we know that operators are still in the process of transforming their systems to enable them to serve customers effectively and all too often the integration points fail to work smoothly, giving customers inconsistent experiences and exposing operators to the risk of customers leaving at key churn points in the customer relationship.

Brite:Bill has recently conducted extensive research with our operator customers across the world and, as part of this, we gathered valuable insights from respondents. Key challenges that were highlighted from the research are similar to the issues we here from the Communications Service Providers (CSPs), including the existence of various churn points. Among these, operators were keen to point out that customers receiving their first bill can be a churn point.  It’s one they are aware of and can quickly address if the customer feels the first bill doesn’t match their expectations.

Another key issue is the lack of personalisation in customer on-boarding communications. For customers that have been promised a tailored, personalised experience, receiving what are clearly standardardised form communications, using this less-favoured channel is an obvious source of discontent.

This is also highlighted in inconsistencies between the customer acquisition process and the on-boarding process. In the retail environment, the operator communicated its brand values as an exciting digital enabler and its capabilities to meet the needs of individuals. If the on-boarding resembles the experience your parents had getting a 2G voice phone in 1999, it’s clear there’s a gap between the promise made and the reality delivered.

Further irritations that CSPs are aware of at this early phase include the variety of different operator systems sending disparate notifications to customers. Some may be duplicated across channels such as SMS and email, while others might be about the same issue but use a different tone of voice or be untimely, for instance, telling them their router is on its way when, in fact it has already been installed.

These issues highlight the on-boarding challenges that operators face and clearly demonstrate the scale and scope of the customer communications challenges. In our research, we uncovered that 36 per cent of customers have switched operators in the last two years and, of those, 16 per cent switched because of billing issues. In saturated markets that’s a big issue and we estimate that for an operator with ten million subscribers the cost of churn is likely to be more than US$400 million.

This churn is not necessarily because the bill itself is wrong, it may be that the costs outlined are not clear to understand or the likely costs had not been properly explained at the time of sign-up. Our research uncovered that 68 per cent of customers say their bill is not clear or easy to understand. This has led to almost one-third of customers contacting their CSP because of billing issues.

More concerning, 18 per cent of customers said their first bill was more than they expected, causing the relationship to get off on the wrong foot and creating a climate of mistrust around the entire relationship. The fact that customers are still being surprised by the cost of their services and feel the need to interact with the call centre is costing operators significantly – both in the cost of call centre operations and in the likely increased churn because of dissatisfaction.

Our research also found that three quarters of customers currently have no interest in the information provided in their bill. However, this doesn’t mean they aren’t interested in receiving additional, relevant information via this channel. 56 per cent of customers want their bill to tell them how to save money while 29 per cent want the bill to tell them about relevant services.

Ultimately, customers want to receive the more personalised experience they get from other types of service providers. 29 per cent want their bill to include interactive graphs and icons so they can monitor and manage their consumption and 44 per cent want the bill to include what services they are spending the most or least on.

New technology, such as chatbots, will add another channel and dimension to customer communications and the bill will cease to be a static communication that simply states costs incurred. 39 per cent of customers say they would like access to a chatbot for bill enquiries, which rises to 50 per cent for generation Z customers, and almost a third (29 per cent) of all respondents think chatbots are a good alternative to a customer care line.

The new customer is enthusiastic and engaged, looking for more personalised relationships with their operators. As growth from new customers slows in saturated markets, the exciting news is operators already have valuable information about their customers and the tools in place to better serve them. They just need to utilise these more effectively to transform communications with the clarity and personalisation that customers expect.