Damian Burnett, Sales Director at VAS-X
Modern customers no longer compare their experience with one telecoms operator against another, they benchmark their engagements against the best digital interactions they’ve had anywhere. This means that if your self-service portal isn’t intuitive, easy to use and available 24/7, your customers will notice and they might even be inspired to go elsewhere.
In fact, a 2017 McKinsey & Co study found that the telecoms companies that implement a comprehensive, analytics-based approach to managing their customer base – which means that they’re using customer data to improve how they address customers needs and provide better experiences – can reduce churn by as much as 15%.
What should self-service portals look like?
Across Africa, especially among younger demographics, customers now expect digital-first interactions, making it essential for brands to offer portals that facilitate these experiences. Now more than ever, forcing customers to interact with your business in a specific way puts your convenience ahead of their experience. This is no longer good enough. If you force customers to contact a call centre or visit a retail outlet to complete routine tasks, it is a sure fire way to lose customers. On the converse, offering choice shows you value them and are willing to meet them where they are.
Smart, self-service portals enable complete customer lifecycle management without any need for human intervention. So a customer can activate a new service, make changes to their plan, pay bills and restore/suspend a service without having to interact with anyone else. As part of this, customers expect uniform experiences whether they’re accessing services through web browsers, mobile apps, or third-party applications via APIs. Inconsistent features or user interfaces across different channels create confusion and can leave customers dissatisfied.
One of the clear benefits of this approach is that customers can immediately log in to such portals and sort things out themselves as and when it suits them, as opposed to call waiting times, call transfers and unreliable service levels.
This also gives customers greater visibility. If, for example, a customer suspects that they’ve been overcharged, they don’t have to log a ticket or contact a help desk. They can easily log onto the portal and access their usage data to make sure that their invoice is correct.
Business benefits
These modern, self-service tools, particularly those that incorporate AI, can also benefit the business. The leaders in AI-enabled customer engagement are using these channels to handle more than 95% of their customer service interactions, which dramatically reduces costs, while also providing around the clock availability, additional McKinsey & Co research shows. By automating the processes for common requests like plan changes and basic troubleshooting, operators can not only improve response times but also free up customer service representatives to focus their attention on resolving more complex issues.
A few additional benefits of self-service tools include the ability to handle large volume spikes of requests without needing to scale up headcount, being able to address a customer’s need at any time, even outside business hours, and being able to provide standardised, accurate responses to common questions. And the data insights a business gains by tracking customer behaviour and interactions makes it easier for businesses to improve products and services.
In a world where consumers are hungry for digital first experiences, operators can no longer think of a self-service portal as a ‘nice to have’. Today, these platforms are essential and are at the core of any successful customer relationship.
