The chatbot telco customer journey
We analyzed over 75 million interactions between telco customers and customer support chatbots.
Our goal was to discover what customers want when they chat with chatbots – and how telecoms can deliver more of what their customers want.
And the purpose of this? To provide telecoms with insights to improve customer experience, increase conversions, as well as boost loyalty and retention.
This is what we discovered:
Top 3 customer demands for telecoms
Chatbots help telcos with 3 main customer support demands:
- Quick issue resolution
- Short waiting times
- Preferred channel support
It shouldn’t come as any surprise that the number one demand is quick issue resolution.
When customers contact a customer service chatbot, they’re looking to get whatever issue they have sorted asap.
And if the chatbot can’t do it? They want to talk to an agent who can.
Seamless transfers to human agents help with that – and it helps to have a solution that facilitates transfers while preserving full conversation history.
Next, customers don’t have all the time in the world – so they want short waiting times.
Chatbots help with this by providing answers immediately.
But when you don’t have chatbots and make your customers queue for a human agent? They’re none too pleased – and 53% of surveyed customers said they’ve switched providers owing to “poor service”.
Rounding off the top 3 things telecom customers demand is – preferred channel support.
This one’s simple and a natural continuation of the previous two. Customers want quick resolution. They also want short waiting times. So it’s only natural they look for this level of service over the channels they feel comfortable using.
Find out more about building the perfect telco chatbot. Download our guide!
How can telcos use chatbots to improve the customer journey?
There are two ways of looking at how telecoms can improve the customer journey:
- The perfect customer support intents for chatbots, and:
- The perfect customer support intents for CX-driven chatbots
Here are some of the best chatbot use cases for telecoms:
The key takeaways here are:
- Telecoms can enhance customer journeys by providing human conversation experiences using intents made for CX-built chatbots.
- They can require fine tuning and in-depth understanding of customer behavior to achieve results (which is easy when coupled with a customer data platform).
- Biometric user verification is one of the most in-demand CX-driven chatbot use cases for friction-free verification.
- “Pre-paid to post-paid” may seem like a rare intent at “just” 2.5% total sessions – but when both existing and potential customers interact with chatbots? Then having nearly 2.5% of your 5 million chats convert goes a long way towards increasing your average revenue per user!
The (automated) telecom customer journey roadmap
By using chatbots, telecoms can fully automate entire stages of the customer journey.
From buying and onboarding, guiding through use, providing support, and even renewals to help customers stay and grow.
CX chatbot best practices
When developing a customer experience chatbot, you want to focus on these 5 key best practices:
- Conversational design – equip bots to assist with basic queries, so that your human agents can assist customers with more demanding queries.
- Continuous learning – optimize chatbot performance by removing unused or unrecognized intents.
- Conversational commerce – build the right flows to turn chatbots into sales channels.
- Seamless agent transfer – there’re some things even a well-trained chatbot can’t handle. Have a well-trained human take over to provide expert assistance.
- Omnichannel – build your chatbots for the most popular chatbots in the world.
Choosing the right chatbot partner
Considering what customers want and the channels prefer – you’d be right in assuming the modern customer expects to interact with a chatbot. In order to provide your customers the experiences and journey they expect, you need:
- The right use cases
- Customer and chatbot personas
- Communication flow
- Conversation design
The ideal partner can provide the communication channels – as well as consult you on the above, thanks to their expertise in providing chatbots to leading global telecoms.
For more on building the best CX chatbot, download our helpful infographic.
