The future of telecoms customer experience: intelligent, personalised and data-driven

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Communications service providers’ (CSPs’) focus on customer experience (CX) and digital engagement has increased sharply over the past decade, driven by changing customer behaviour, the need to reduce support costs and competition. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated CSPs’ plans for digitising their engagement channels, but even before the crisis, digital customer experience was a priority that many CSPs chose to address ahead of transforming other functional systems. However, this was not always the case; until the past decade, CSPs often overlooked their customer engagement systems and instead directed investments towards improving network coverage and monetisation.

The pronounced shift in the business and operating environment has been a key driver of the evolution of CSPs’ approach to customer experience in the past decades. Many CSPs were late to start transforming their digital channels, so most still have much to do in order to provide a digital experience that is comparable with that of a digital native company. Companies such as Amazon, Netflix and Uber have redefined digital experience with their intuitive designs, seamless transactions and extensive control through the mobile app. The mobile-first (and in many cases, digital-only) strategies of these digital native companies have generated rich dividends in terms of lower costs of operation, faster times to market and deeper engagement with the end customer.