As we are now entering an era where data analytics and data collection can provide organizations with more than just a competitive edge, the telecom industry is seen rapidly adopting Artificial intelligence to strengthen customer relationships and generate sizable profits. There are many use cases of AI in telecommunications. Among them, the most visible application is enhancing customer service via artificial intelligence. Many leading telecom companies around the world are now using AI in many of their key processes. Automated Chatbots, personalized offers, and streamlined customer service processes are some such implementations.
We can perceive three areas in AI-powered customer experience in the telecom sector. They are Customer service communication(virtual assistants), Sales and personalized user experience, and call center automation.
Up until 2019 the telecom industry ranked very low in the customer satisfaction index. The beginning of 2020 marks the advancement of customer services in the telecom sector. One tool that’s enabling this advancement is virtual assistants. Telecom companies could advance immensely in terms of customer engagement and better services if they increase their digital customer services. Unfortunately, these companies do not have sufficient human resources to concentrate more on digital-first sales. Intelligent Virtual assistants are the solution to this problem. These companies can utilize VAs to assist their current teams in digital services in various manners.
Customer support teams in general have to address some redundant and repeated issues from customers. Individually attending to them can be time-consuming. But with virtual assistants teams can now effectively address these issues. For example, VAs can be utilized for Call Detail Recordings, which provide information like regulatory guidelines, maintenance works, or outages. Furthermore, they can be used to log incident reports, refunds, updates, and complaints. This is exactly what Nokia did introducing MIKA which helped them in diagnostics and dealing with common network issues.
Using a mixture of bots and human counterparts customer service teams have been able to shift to remote customer servicing. This was attained by allowing conversational bots to tend to simple customer queries without any human intervention. It was found in an IBM survey, that more than 50% of telecom customers preferred using any self-service options. These bots partake in data lookups, simple service diagnostic tests, or settings changes. If virtual assistants come across a complex issue they will direct it to the human agents and even set priorities for them. The best part of these virtual assistants is that they have self-learning capabilities and hence will increase in efficiency over time.
Virtual assistants can swiftly communicate information to human agents because they aid with basic consumer screening. They give the support team general information about the client or account, details about the issue, details about previous resolution techniques, and priority/severity status.
They will be able to provide the agent with a summary of the useful information by utilizing high-quality virtual assistants with NLP skills. For instance, Telia, a Swedish telecom company, recommended that a chatbot may assist in finishing the task, which included 18 agents answering the same questions over and over again.
Telecom providers may deliver highly individualized suggestions by utilizing virtual assistants that are coupled with deep learning algorithms. In fact, one telecom operator that used this strategy had a more than 10% rise in revenue and a rise in LTV client portfolios.
Additionally, utilizing a variety of digital platforms may assist draw in, convert, engage, and retain new consumers while keeping hold of existing ones. Other than chatbots and inquiry routing systems machine learning algorithms are also used to retain customers and make higher profits. I.e. generating customized suggestions for users based on their use trends and content choices.
Through the facts discussed in the above article, it is quite clear that any telecom company can benefit immensely by integrating AI, specifically chatbots and Virtual assistants in streamlining their customer service. AI in the telecom sector offers various advantages to businesses. It can handle an unending stream of client questions efficiently and get rid of redundant network administration processes. Integrating AI-powered chatbots into your customer service efforts might just be the best inaugural step in assimilating AI into your telecom company.
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