How Telcos are Using AI to Drive Continuous Improvement in Customer Experience Monitoring

Organizations in all sectors have long understood that good customer care is vital if business is to flourish. This is as true in the telecommunications industry as it is in any other. Operators today take a customer-centric approach to their processes, and advances in technology are allowing them to excel in this respect.

Social media and other digital platforms already form an integral part of customer experience monitoring in telco. There’s a good reason for that – with research by Microsoft showing that more than half of the people who engage with brands via social media and have their customer service issues resolved in that way have a positive view of the brand in question.

In our always connected, always “on” world, it’s also important that telcos monitor and manage customer experience in real time, or as close to real time as possible. What this means is that, not only do customers expect to be able to contact their operator via a social media or other digital channel that is most convenient for them, they also expect to be able to do so at any time. And they certainly don’t like to be kept waiting for a response to their questions or solution to their problems.

AI in customer communications for telecommunications 

Artificial intelligence drives customer experience. Telcos, therefore, are turning to increasingly sophisticated solutions based on artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to help them meet these needs. These solutions can, for example, be taught to recognize and respond appropriately to questions raised through digital platforms that use chatbots. Operators are already moving things to the next level in this area of customer experience monitoring and management thanks to natural language processing (NLP). This is based on constantly evolving, rules-based models of human languages which, thanks to deep learning techniques and ML, can help computers understand and respond to written and spoken words. If this idea of computers communicating independently with humans sounds like something from a science fiction movie, it’s worth remembering that the technology allowing it to happen has been with us for some time – in the form of speech to text transcribers, digital assistants such as Siri and Alexa, and voice-controlled navigation.

Deploying NLP and other AI/ML tools in this way certainly helps telcos (and organizations from other sectors) keep up with requirements in terms of customer experience monitoring and management. And that means they are better placed to ensure the customers they already have are satisfied – and win more through recommendation or reputation.