According to a recent Forester research, Telco service providers are not scoring brownie points when it comes to positive customer experience. Providing the best customer experience is one of the most important factors that ignite success in any industry. Especially, this stands very true when it comes to telecom industry because the competition always turns wild, with a great number of service providers fighting for the absolute glory.

To ensure optimum customer experience, Chief Experience Officers should focus on each steps of customer life cycle. This helps to improve the revenue while cutting down the churn rate. CXOs must make sure that their basics are in place because it always helps to reduce the customer effort and keep the customers happy. Let’s look into a customer life cycle a little deeper. A typical customer life cycle has four phases –

• Pre-sales
• Sales and provisioning
• Service assurance
• In-life management

Pre-sales can be defined as a set of activities carried out before getting a customer on board. The activities including Customer Lead and Order Process are categorized into Sales and Provisioning. Service assurance is to support the customer after submitting the order until service activation. The activities that help the customer once the service is activated are termed as In-life Management.

To ensure great customer experience, you must also take a few more elements in consideration.

• Customer accessibility
• Right First Time (RFT)
• Keep Customer Informed (KCI

Customer Accessibility

It is important to answer customers’ queries quickly and resolve the concerned issues as soon as possible. Customer must be able to be in touch with the organization through various modes of contact- Email, Call, Social Media and Live Chat. Huge presence of ‘millennial customers’ increases the importance of mobility solutions as they often connect through their mobile devices.

Right First Time

High importance should be given to Customer queries related to fault, sales, service and billing. These queries must be answered quickly. The very need for more calls can eventually lead clients to dissatisfaction with the service.

Keep Customer Informed

For a Telco company, it is always safe to inform their customers about the concerned query statuses, through their preferred mode of contact. There must be a separate department to ensure the customer issues are resolved as soon as possible. Customers don’t usually promote the brands that make them wait and call again for resolving the issues.

Cycle Duration

Most times, customers have to wait for long to get their queries heard and answered. Sometimes, the call gets disconnected. Ambushed and disillusioned, they make use of Facebook and Twitter to lodge their complaints. To solve this problem, you need to set a waiting period of customer preference and monitor it regularly and increase the resources if the call volumes get higher. Customers show much more patience with the chat option because there are more chances of getting your query addressed quickly.

Keep it Simple

Customers usually don’t promote the brands which demand a lot of efforts from them during a customer touch point. If the customer can reach out to the brand easily, they will promote it. So the mantra is to keep it easy. Always keep usability/simplicity of customer experience at the centre of all IT solutions and processes.

Author Bio:

Abhishek Jain has over 10 years of experience within the BPO Industry and Customer lifecycle management services. Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) Services India delivers and manages various offshore/onsite projects in various technologies and domains.