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January 30, 2015

Examining a Bold New World for Telcos

By Eric Lebowitz, Digital Content Editor

For decades, the telecom industry changed very little. Telephone communications were the only channel available to customers, which made running a business and providing customer service relative easy for operators. In recent years, however, that dynamic has been turned on its ear. As customer expectations for multichannel customer service have grown, operators are faced with a new set of challenges.



During the panel session entitled, “Customer Experience and Telco 2.0” on the morning of Friday, January 30 at ITEXPO Miami, two veterans of the telecom industry discussed what the next generation of telco will look like and what trends are driving change in the sector right now. 

“If you think about what’s happening today, we are probably seeing the greatest seismic change in our industry since it began, said Rene Sotola, VP at CGI (News - Alert). “The paradigm shifted when suddenly the telcos were in the application business.” 

In further explaining his point, Sotola discussed millennial expectations for customer service. For these younger customers, the traditional contact center is nothing more than an afterthought. Customers in their 20s and 30s expect to be able to resolve any issue or complete any task related to service from their mobile devices.  

“Millennials don’t want to hold on the phone for 20 minutes,” Sotola said. “They want self-service and mobile commerce. The millennial customer wants to do it now, and they want to do if from their mobile phone.”

One of the other challenges today’s telcos are facing is the mass migration of contact centers away from traditional PTSN. Some of these organizations are attempting to consolidate dozens of different facilities—operating on different networks—and thousands of employees into a single system. As Hugh Goldstein, VP of Strategic Alliances at Voxbone (News - Alert) explained, many of these organizations are leveraging the cloud to complete these migrations. 

“They’re actually skipping a few levels in upgrading their call centers,” Goldstein said. “They are replacing 20-year-old technology, in some cases, with a sophisticated suite of cloud contact center solutions.” 

Sotola noted that many telcos are still struggling to figure out a way to constructively use social media. He provided an anecdote from a recent conference he attended where an executive from an operator said that he wished social media had never been invented, as it puts customer response demands on large companies that are difficult to meet. In Sotola’s view, however, these carriers are missing a massive opportunity to learn more about what their customers want.

“Too many operators are looking at social media as an enemy,” Sotola said. “But if you harvest the unstructured data from social networks, you may not save the person who has already decided to leave, but you can build a winning strategy for other customers based on that information.”

Both Goldstein and Sotola believe the customer experience will determine which telcos have the greatest success moving forward. In one simple statement, Sotola got right to the crux of the panel session.

“In the developed world, you have to steal customers to become successful,” Sotola said. “So the question is, how do you do that?”




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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