Leigh Pullen, Founder and CEO, CiGen, new technology and a customer’s right to choose has led to telecommunications to depend more on developing digital infrastructure, such as SD-WAN.
Telecommunications is incredibly complex with myriad billing processes, consumers that demand freedom of choice when it comes to everything from hardware to communications allowances, and backend infrastructure that depends on new technologies such as SD-WAN (Software Defined Wide Area Networks).
Many telecommunication companies are already starting to leverage the power of automation to help with reducing administrative burden, improve customer service and many back-end processes. McKinsey & Co estimates that between 25 and 46 percent of current work activities in Australia could be automated by 2030. If seized, this opportunity could add AUD$1.1 trillion to AUD$4 trillion to the economy over the next 15 years.
Here are three ways to further optimize with automation:
1. Free staff to focus on higher value tasks
A vast number of different operational processes are repetitive, monotonous and boring and take staff away from higher value work. When a workflow is understood and mapped, the opportunities to automate can be identified.
Software can reduce the manual intervention required by staff, freeing them up to solve more challenging problems and by mapping each process step with its associated cost for manual execution, it is easy to identify which steps will lead to highest return on investment through automation.
As business systems and processes have become increasingly digitized, the ability to collect, process and use data has become a key differentiator between telecommunication providers that deliver poor and great service. When a customer enters a store or calls a contact center, intelligent automation can assist employees by offering real-time guidance and customer insights.
2. Automate to boost customer service
When intelligent automation is deployed, it can automatically perform actions such as retrieving specific customer information, rekeying data and updating fields. This allows the customer service representative to focus more on delighting the customer. As well as assisting customer service representatives to resolve issues faster, they are freed up to serve more customers, boost customer engagement and experience and deliver higher customer satisfaction and retention.
Telecommunications in Australia is fiercely competitive and companies need to keep abreast of market changes and conduct regular competitor analysis. For example, in the mobile space there are more and more MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) purchasing wholesale access to mobile networks and reselling it.
Instead of allocating headcount to checking competitor websites for updated pricing, use software to automate the process. The analysis can take place more frequently and highlight in real-time when changes occur. As well as being fast and reliable, automation means your product specialists can focus on creating new and improved customer offers rather than trawling through websites to manually try and glean intelligence.
3. Assist enterprise customers with complex transitions
Telecommunication providers support their customers through transitions.
For example, when a customer migrates their mobile and phone numbers to another carrier, there’s a national procedure for the carriers to follow when moving (or porting) numbers between carriers. Whether its Category A or Category C porting, the new carrier is required to raise porting requests, provide phone number details, confirm ownership, inform the original carrier, set a change date between the carriers and update various customer and phone network applications.
When telcos assist customers as they transition to a new communications platform, there’s a need to extract data from the legacy system and transfer it to the new platform. This can include address books, call routing, IVR information and other configuration information.
The communication between customer, carriers and updating of porting applications can be handled easily through intelligent automation. Once the rules and process for the extraction and transfer are known, intelligent automation tools can carry out the operations. It can also be used to regularly backup data as well, giving the business assurance that it can quickly recover from a system failure.
Intelligent automation can help telecommunication providers drive better outcomes for all their customers, from individual consumers through to large enterprises. In an increasingly competitive market, telecommunications companies, whether they are major infrastructure providers or new MVNOs, need to ensure maximum efficiency and optimized customer service to compete and thrive.
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