Improving the customer experience (CX) is now a high priority for many telecoms. According to the 2022 State of Customer Loyalty and Churn in Telecom report, the telecom industry experiences the highest churn rates—by far. Almost half (46%) of the 2,706 survey respondents reported canceling a phone, internet, TV or cable contract within the past year due to poor customer service. More than one-fifth (21%) churned after a single negative experience. The next highest churn rate (18.7%) occurs in the online services/app industry.
Communication service providers (CSPs) understand the importance of improving the customer experience, but many find it difficult to do so. In a global survey of 121 telco CX leaders, 48% of respondents indicated that lack of understanding or appreciation for customer journeys is one of the biggest challenges to delivering successful CX. Employees don’t have access to the tools and data they need to fully understand customer journeys. Telco CX executives reported that they find it extremely challenging to:
- Analyze and make sense of customer data to gain insights about customer behaviors (42%)
- Provide employees access to real-time customer behavior data (44%)
Journey analytics offers the solution. Telecom customer journey analytics transforms customer journey data into valuable insights, guiding improvements in CX and driving business outcomes.
What Is Customer Journey Analytics?
Customer journey analytics describes what’s happening on the customer journey–the unique path of interactions a consumer has with your brand, products or services, from initial awareness through purchasing and using the products or services. Journey analytics tracks and measures every interaction with your brand, across every channel (e.g., website, email or SMS) and device (e.g., laptop, tablet or smartphone) the customer uses. By giving you valuable insights into how customers interact with your telecom business, journey analytics helps you understand and guide customer behavior in ways that are relevant to them. It also identifies friction points—areas of customer experience that need improvement.
Customer Journey Analytics Helps You Understand:
Customer behavior, interests, desires, needs and expectations. This understanding makes it easier to connect with customers and personalize communications and content based on what customers need at any given moment. For example, if journey analytics detects that a customer regularly exceeds their data allowance, incurring overage charges, the journey orchestration system can send an offer for an upgraded data package.
Where the customer journey derails. Journeys don’t always go as planned. When something goes awry (i.e., the customer doesn’t achieve the desired outcome), journey analytics provides a visualization layer that shows you what happened (e.g., friction points that disrupted the journey). For example, a customer may have trouble logging in to the payment portal (a friction point), resulting in late payment.
How to improve the customer journey and CX. Journey analytics tells you which customer interactions to focus on to have the maximum impact on CX. If journey analytics reveals that many customers are calling the contact center after viewing their wireless bill, you may decide to implement a digital bill explanation tool to reduce bill confusion and prevent those costly live agent calls.
When you use these valuable insights to improve CX, you can:
- Improve conversion rates
- Increase customer loyalty and retention
- Boost revenue and reduce cost (e.g., by reducing contact center calls)
Customer Journey Analytics Also Allows You to:
Identify the customer journey steps that have the biggest impact on specific business goals. For example, are customers canceling their internet service after a negative call center interaction?
Make data-driven decisions and respond more quickly. You can refer to real-time data analytics for the information you need right now instead of relying on guesswork or waiting for reports from IT teams who may not have all the answers needed to handle an immediate problem. For example, real time customer data reveals that broadband customers in the Northeast are calling your contact center because they are rolling off their introductory rate and are surprised by the higher rate. To prevent churn, you can immediately trigger an upgrade offer for affected customers. You can also implement a digital bill explanation tool.
4 Types of Customer Analytics
Four types of customer analytics apply to customer journeys: Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive and prescriptive.
- Descriptive analytics: Collects and assesses data about past customer actions
- What it Does: Answers the question: What happened?
- What Doesn’t Tell You: Why something happened
- Telcom Churn Example: Analyzes usage and customer data to determine the overall churn rate over a specific period. The current churn rate is 15% higher than last quarter.
- Diagnostic analytics: Determines the cause of trends and why customers acted a certain way
- What it Does: Why did it happen?
- What Doesn’t Tell You: What will happen in the future
- Analyzes customer feedback, call records and service quality metrics to determine why the churn rate increased. Churn increased due to poor customer service; customers had to call several times to resolve a problem.
- Predictive analytics: Forecasts what customers will do based on historical data
- What it Does: What is likely to happen?
- What Doesn’t Tell You: What action to take in the future
- Analyzes historical data on customer behavior (usage patterns, payment history and customer service interactions) to predict which customers are likely to churn. Customers who have to call more than twice to resolve a problem are more likely to churn in the next month.
- Prescriptive analytics: Provides specific recommendations
- What it Does: What should we do about it?
- What Doesn’t Tell You: How to act in a particular situation (by considering the broader context)
- Recommends specific actions to reduce churn. Proactive service outage notifications eliminate the need for customers to call repeatedly for status updates.
6 Best Practices for Implementing Telecom Customer Journey Analytics
To improve CX and customer loyalty, follow these best practices as you collect and analyze telecom customer journey data.
1. Define business objectives and set specific goals. What do you want to achieve by collecting and analyzing customer data?
- Increase cross/upsell sales
- Reduce churn
- Increase customer satisfaction/CX
- Reduce call center volume and associated costs
After you’ve spelled out your general objectives, it’s time to set specific, measurable goals that align with them, such as:
- Boost upsell conversions by 10%
- Increase contract renewal rates by 2%
- Increase CSAT scores by 2 points
- Reduce the number of contact center calls by 22%
- Increase first contact resolution by 35%
2. Decide how to collect customer journey data.
- Customer journey analytics software
- Contact center software (customer service interactions)
- Customer relationship management (CRM) software
- AI-driven tools (e.g., natural language processing)
- Customer surveys
- Social media listening tools
- All of the above
A customer data platform collects, integrates and manages data across various systems (CRM, contact center software, billing system) and departments (sales and marketing, customer service), simplifying the process.
3. Create a customer journey map. A journey map is a visual representation of the steps/actions a customer takes while trying to accomplish a particular task (pay a bill, schedule a service appointment, change plans/bundles). Customer journey mapping helps you understand customers’ behaviors, needs and preferences so you can tailor communications accordingly.
4. Use customer journey analytics software to analyze the data. Journey analytics software combines individual channel analytics (email open and click through rates, time on website, time to serve) and customer intent (e.g., intent to purchase or cancel). Journey analytics software assigns each journey step (logging into the payment portal, viewing the bill, calling the contact center) a positive, neutral or negative value, allowing you to see at a glance if journeys are leading to positive action (e.g., paying a bill right away). If a journey step doesn’t lead to positive action, you can implement strategies to improve or prevent the step. For example, a digital bill explanation tool reduces bill confusion, preventing customers from calling the contact center.
5. Identify areas for improvement and implement changes. Using the valuable insights you’ve acquired through predictive analytics and prescriptive analytics, decide where to make changes to improve CX. For example, you could improve first contact resolution by implementing a telco-specific agent desktop solution that provides all the information agents need to assist customers quickly and accurately the first time they call. Or reduce call center volume by instituting a digital bill explanation tool that reduces bill confusion.
6. Track changes to evaluate CX improvement efforts. Use metrics to evaluate the impact of your CX improvement efforts on customer satisfaction, retention, revenue and other key performance indicators.
- Contact center performance
- Number of calls per desired time frame
- Average call length
- Average hold time
- Average handle time (includes post-call tasks)
- First contact resolution (FCR)
- Customer experience
- Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- Customer effort score (CES)
- Customer retention rate
Ready to Start Improving the Telecom Customer Experience?
Take advantage of customer journey analytics to understand customer behavior and needs, identify where journeys break down and make data-driven decisions about CX improvement efforts.
CSG Xponent, our award-winning customer journey management solution, includes journey analytics to help you understand how customers interact with your brand, predict behavior and deliver tailored communications to improve CX.
Start Optimizing Your Customer Journeys
Speak to an expert today to start improving telecom customer journeys.
