Telecom Argentina CTO: Customer Experience Is King

Telecom carriers obviously have to care about the nuts and bolts of their networks and supporting technologies and processes. But their customers don’t – they simply want excellent performance and user experience.

That reality is driving the digital transformation strategy at Telecom Argentina, according to CTO Miguel Fernandez, who spoke with Telecoms.com at MWC 2023 in Barcelona.

“Customers are not interested in how the network works,” Fernandez said. “What they want is to use their applications and have a good experience. They are becoming more sophisticated year by year, and have more demands with our services.

As a result, Telecom Argentina is investing significantly in expanding and modernizing its network – and seeing considerable improvements in its customer experience and satisfaction metrics as a result. The carrier has approximately doubled the number of sites on its network during the last five years and modernized the rest of the mobile network, increasing its LTE capacity and coverage as a result.

But again, customers don’t necessarily care about how things work under the hood – they care about their user experience – and there is no one-size-fits-all requirement.

“For example, video streamers are concerned about video quality and download speeds; gamers are concerned about latency; those using smart home applications are concerned about the availability of our services,” Fernandez explained. So, the challenge is how to measure different users’ experience, and usability of the applications that they decide to have, and how to translate that measurement into actions to improve the customer experience.”

Telecom Argentina has certainly risen to that challenge: The company has boosted its mobile broadband (MBB) Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 10 points, decreasing the number of detractors by 35% in the process. That makes Telecom Argentina the MBB Service NPS leader in the Argentinean market, according to Fernandez.

A key part of its success comes from managing customer experience data and trends proactively, as customers engage with the company’s different services, such as its Flow TV/video service. Telecom Argentina deployed Huawei’s SmartCare Customer Experience Management solution for autonomous CEI demarcation. Fernandez says the company can now predict NPS with 90% accuracy.

“Huawei is an important strategic partner in this transformation,” Fernandez said. “It has rich global experience as an industry leader and a professional team made up of local and expatriate talent to help us set up our service operation center.”

That has been pivotal to Telecom Argentina’s internal talent development, enriching the skills and knowledge its team needed to transform its network and customer experience.

In the next phase of its transformation, Fernandez said Telecom Argentina will expand its mobile experience to FTTH, relying on a deep packet inspection tool to do so. The carrier recently added Huawei’s ADO platform for measuring CEI for FTTH connections. In its proof of concept trial with ADO, Telecom Argentina achieved 85% NPS survey accuracy during POC. It’s now implementing four use cases with the platform – “upsell,” “user journey,” “network insight,” and “VIP care” – with multiple business goals, including continuing to improve FTTH NPS prediction accuracy and reducing churn.

“This transformation is an ongoing journey”, Fernandez said. “While we have made significant progress, there is still much to be done to ensure that we are delivering the best possible service to our customers.”