The 2024 outlook for the global telecom market, while cautious, remains largely positive, with modest growth projections ranging from 1.5% to 3.5% across different regions.
Inflation, interest rates, and broader economic concerns are prompting consumers to adopt a more cautious approach to spending. Despite being price-conscious, customers continue to expect and demand personalized experiences, rapid connectivity, and a variety of service options.
To stay competitive and meet evolving customer needs, telecom companies are taking steps such as reducing personnel costs, optimizing marketing expenditures, and embracing emerging technologies like AI, automation, and 5G.
However, it’s important to note that some telecom companies have resorted to price increases to mitigate the impact of rising costs. This strategy carries its own risks, as it can potentially lead to increased customer churn – a real concern given that both wireless and broadband customers are contemplating switching providers. This underscores the critical need for telecom companies to prioritize building stronger customer relationships.
To drive growth, telecom companies are selectively investing in technology and process improvements to diversify into high-growth market segments, including mobile data and enterprise services such as edge computing, B2B2X, and network slicing.
Key Elements in Defining a Blueprint of Success for Telecom Operators:
- Customer Focus:
In today’s competitive landscape, customer experience reigns supreme. An impressive 88% of customers emphasize the significance of the experience provided by a company, placing it on par with the importance of products or services. To effectively leverage customer data, communications providers should focus on several key strategies:- Evolve the customer journey: Create seamless omnichannel experiences by integrating online and offline touchpoints, allowing customers to interact with your brand consistently across various channels.
- Personalize customer journeys: Use customer data to personalize marketing efforts and service-related outreach at scale. Tailor your communications to individual preferences and needs to foster stronger customer relationships.
- Proactively address issues: Leverage predictive analytics to anticipate and prevent potential issues such as network faults, billing surprises, and service disruptions before they arise. This proactive approach enhances customer satisfaction and reduces the need for reactive support.
- Enhance self-service options: Implement advanced self-service capabilities using Gen AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants. These tools can handle routine inquiries and resolve issues efficiently, freeing up human agents to focus on more complex customer interactions.
- Digital Transformation:
- Embrace automation: Leverage self-service tools and AI-driven services to boost efficiency and enhance customer satisfaction.
- Humanize the digital experience: Integrate self-service with human interactions to craft seamless customer experiences.
- Bundle beyond traditional: Transform offerings by incorporating non-traditional services like streaming, banking, and cybersecurity to strengthen customer loyalty and generate new revenue streams.
- Leveraging Data and AI as Vectors of Growth:
- Harness customer data: Use AI/ML to personalize experiences and drive sales.
- Unlock new growth: Use AI capabilities like predictive analytics in targeting marketing campaigns.
- Be proactive, and predictive: Optimize network performance and predict failures, boosting customer experience and profitability.
- Network Transformation:
- Network modernization: Investing in network upgrades is crucial to meet customer expectations for speed, reliability, and capacity. 5G opens doors for network as a service, IoT solutions, and network slicing.
- Monetizing the network: Providers are exploring innovative ways to generate income beyond basic connectivity, such as selling network capacity or offering managed services.
- Partnerships and ecosystems: Collaborating with other companies can open new market opportunities and create value for customers.
- Building trust through security and compliance:
- Transparency and ethical use of data for AI through governance is essential for building trust with customers in the digital age.
- Ensure robust cybersecurity practices to prevent data breaches.
- Remaining committed to reducing the industry’s carbon footprint and environmental impact.
How Telecom Solutions from Onix Deliver Customer Value
As a Google Cloud partner, Onix can modernize this growing industry with a range of telecom solutions including:
- Evaluating existing marketing and service data sources to develop a holistic strategy for creating a unified customer view on Google BigQuery (BQ), a cloud data warehouse.
- Assisting with data migration and validation processes during the transition to Google BigQuery (BQ).
- Employing a data-driven approach to prioritize customer experience personalization initiatives.
- Leveraging AI and ML to design and build individualized, context-aware next-best-action/offer engines that drive cross-selling, upselling, and churn prevention throughout the customer lifecycle.
- Implementing Contact Center automation solutions, with Generative AI-based tools like Contact Center AI (CCAI), to modernize, optimize, and reduce cost in customer operations.
- Enhancing Generative AI by securely integrating internal/proprietary knowledge bases with Retrieval Augmented Generation LLM.
Check out Onix’s customer success stories for more information. Ready to talk to an expert? Contact us today.
