Are you satisfied with the customer experience you get from your telecommunications company?
Research suggests that the answer is “probably not”. If we take a look at just some of the different surveys and indexes that have been published with a focus on customer service analysis, we see that Telecoms companies consistently hold up the rear in terms of satisfaction in the UK, Europe, and America.
The Terrible Satisfaction Scores
For instance, a glance at the American Customer Satisfaction Index shows how customers in the U.S. feel about their interactions with a range of businesses from different sectors, including transportation, retail, governmental bodies, finance, and of course, telecommunications. The results indicate that Telecommunications is the second least satisfactory industry on the board, coming in just ahead of the government. If we examine the industry breakdown, we also find that CSP services like television, ISP, and fixed-line telephony all score abysmally low.
The same trend continues throughout the globe. In Europe, the Institute of Customer Service shows that while the best-performing services in Europe can be found in the retail market with a satisfaction rate of 75.6, Telecommunications and media services come in at a measly 68.0, well under insurance, transportation, utilities, banking, and more. Telecommunication services come last in the UK too, with a UKCSI score of only 73.6.
So much evidence seems to suggest that the Telecoms industry is falling drastically short of the mark when it comes to providing a reliable and effective service for its customers. Despite the fact that more people than ever before are relying on technology and communication connections to help them succeed in the world of business, there’s a significant gap between what customers expect from their providers, and the service they receive.
So, What’s Gone Wrong?
According to Julio Lema, the problem appears to be a disconnect surrounding Perceived Quality, value, and customer expectations. In other words, our modern Telecom providers simply haven’t found a way to properly measure what their customers want from them when it comes to service and support.
There’s plenty of reasons why customer satisfaction could be a problem for the modern Telecoms market. After all, the services that are being offered to businesses today are far more complicated than the original Telecoms offerings we had a decade or so ago. As the technology evolves, the ability of businesses to track that technology has remained stagnant, meaning that telecommunication service providers are steering blindly into a digital revolution.
As an explosion of data usage drives customer expectations upwards, new customer segments emerge, and pressures surrounding costs continue to mount, it seems that service providers are struggling to find the right customer-centric offer to please the masses.
Time for a New Approach?
Despite the evolving Telecoms landscape, many service providers continue to follow the same process when attempting to optimise their solutions. They’re using customer troubleshooting efforts, tracking network KPIs for negative trends, and driving tests for periodic benchmarks – but this may not be enough. Instead, it could be time for the modern service provider to up their game, and start asking themselves what’s missing in the world of customer service. The best service providers will need to begin exploring new solutions for satisfaction, conducting customer surveys, exploiting self-care apps, and tracking transactional NPS.
For service providers to thrive, they need more than just a “standard” Telecoms experience, they need to enrich their customer experience with better data sources measuring QoE on customer devices, they need to optimise individual experience, and benchmark themselves against Wi-Fi.
The answer is out there, but the last thing that Telecoms can do is simply ignore the problem. Telecommunications remains to be one of the most essential sectors in the economy, and a ranking of such low satisfaction represents more than just a simple problem – it could be a disaster.
