The term “customer experience” or “customer service” has always been fundamental in business. Customers often find themselves attracted to the brands and organisations that can offer them exceptional service. Businesses, in turn, know that by offering a superior customer experience they can be confident customers would return to the business and be open to parting with more money in return for a better experience.
As however, the digital world overtook consumers' buying habits, it became clear that customers were still expecting organisations to deliver a high level of customer experience, albeit now through a screen. The digital customer experience, therefore, became critical for brands looking to be successful.
A digital customer experience can therefore be defined as all the touchpoints or interactions a customer has with your brand when online. This can include your company website, social media, apps, or chatbots. To create a good digital customer experience, customers need to be able to fulfil their desired purpose in an easy, frictionless manner. They could be looking for information on a product or looking to make a purchase, but it needs to be easy, memorable and enjoyable. A bad digital customer experience often arises from brands making information or support hard to find or even making purchasing difficult.
For telecommunication companies, it has become vital to provide a good digital customer experience due to the high number of competitors operating within the field. With emerging technologies like eSIM, consumers will find it much easier to switch providers, sometimes as quickly as a few button clicks, so operators must look to provide an exceptional experience and continue to find ways to improve it. Doing so will allow them to build and retain a solid customer base.
A good customer experience is often determined by if the customer gets what they wanted too from the interaction. This is no different from a digital customer experience. For a telecom, to provide a good digital customer experience they will need to make sure that best practices are installed across their whole operation. A good business support system BSS can be critical to this, ensuring all customer requests, contacts and payments are handled quickly and effectively. It can also translate these touchpoints into relevant data insights that can be used to further enhance a digital customer experience.
By collecting and analysing customer data correctly telecoms can start to build an understanding of customer sentiment at key times within the customer journey. Using this telecoms can start to build a strategy based on customer satisfaction, building on what has provided customers with the best experience in the past and replicating it. In this sense, telecoms will stop actively chasing customers and instead anticipate and adapt to their needs. This high level of personalisation, paired with other attractive propositions like contract flexibility, competitive pricing and secure data management will be key to building a good customer experience and maintaining consumer loyalty.
New technologies will also play a part in the customer experience service providers will offer. Many consumers are now taking an active interest in the latest technologies emerging on the market and anticipate how they can adapt them to their daily lives. A recent example of this is the rollout of 5G networks. Customers are now expecting to experience a faster, more stable and higher-quality connectivity due to the emergence of 5G. Those that have been unable or slow to deploy and monetise these technologies have found themselves losing customers to networks that can.
Lifecycle’s BBS is vital in underpinning a network operator or service provider's business operations. Its adaptability is perfectly suited to supporting rapidly changing market conditions, new business models and product offerings. From the point of sale, through to customer management, billing and reporting you can be confident you will deliver a seamless digital customer experience. Find out more about our Business Support System now.