Reimagine Your Customer Experience with Intelligent Customer Interactions
Consumer expectations from communications and media service providers have never been higher. By consumers, we’re talking about the always-on, hyper-digital consumers who don’t belong to the same old segmentation categories of yesterday. Today, it’s no longer about Gen X, Y, or Z. Rather, it’s about Generation C, which is neither defined by age nor other demographics: it’s about caring deeply about creation, curation, connection and community. It’s both an attitude and a mindset.
This attitude and mindset are also about expecting the kind of experience that digital natives such as Amazon, Uber, and Alibaba deliver. What Generation C, and – quite frankly – nearly all consumers expect is to have the digital native experience replicated by their service providers.
Once we order a service, we want to consume it immediately. We can hardly wait two weeks to get our package upgraded. If we start experiencing a network issue, we don’t want to have to explain it to the service rep at the contact center. We expect the rep to do the explaining and let us know how the issue is being resolved. And, if our data package is about to expire, we definitely don’t want it to happen in the middle of the big game or season finale we’re streaming on our mobile device.
This is why service providers need to be proactive in finding out exactly what we want, why we want it, and how to best deliver it. And, the only way to make this happen is to get a full and accurate view of customer preferences, activities and interests – in real time. This is what a 360-degree customer profile that is driven by artificial intelligence (AI), is all about.
The challenges & risks of not making it happen
Gartner cites that “84% of consumers report their experiences with digital tools and services fall short of expectations.” Why?
With customer data typically scattered across multiple, siloed internal and external data sources, the result is a fragmented customer profile rather than one that is integrated and inclusive. This means that the implications of customers’ past behaviors and preferences are obscured, and real-time events and opportunities are left untreated. To complicate matters further, consumers are using multiple devices and consuming numerous services across various lines of business, making it all the more difficult to get that complete view.
Despite these challenges, the ability to access a unified customer profile is not something on which service providers can compromise. If they can’t deliver on customer wants and needs, and the experience delivered does not meet expectations, the risk of churn is astounding with 67% of consumers citing bad experiences as the reason for switching service providers.
For service providers themselves, this should be very worrisome. According to the TM Forum whitepaper, “The CSPs Guide to AI-Driven 360˚ Customer Profiles,” numerous reports on customer experience have consistently returned findings that service providers are lagging behind all other verticals in this area, “and they have the churn rates and Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to prove it.”
A crucial tool in the service provider’s arsenal to fight this phenomenon is an AI-driven 360-degree customer profile. Its value lies in the ability to consolidate real-time BSS/OSS and other operational data, usage, network and location, digital data (web clicks) and TV viewing data to create a unified and actionable view of customers – and then enrich it even further with third-party and behavioral data.
It also represents a “single source of the truth” that is dynamic and constantly evolving in real-time, which means it can accurately reflect changing customer patterns and behaviors. This can then be supplemented by machine-learning capabilities and real-time customer KPIs, which enable the service provider to identify the customer’s current experiences and future intents, such as churn risk and purchase propensity, and trigger alerts when there is a change in the customer’s profile. Moreover, it can expose actionable insights to modern business solutions such as journey management systems and customer care agents. The result is a powerful capability to anticipate customer needs and proactively engage them to improve revenue, reduce churn and enhance their experience.
