Customer acquisition is important for any business, but it turns out that retention is even more so. The most successful growth companies in the world generate 80% of their value creation by unlocking new revenues from existing customers, according to McKinsey.
Customer retention in the telecom industry—especially in the ultra-competitive B2C market—is everything. Communications service providers (CSPs) are re-prioritizing spend toward strengthening loyalty. According to Analysys Mason, “CSPs increasingly want to adjust the bias of their spending on customer engagement away from acquisition and towards customer retention.”
Still, customer churn reduction for telecoms is an uphill battle. Customer loyalty toward CSPs dropped 22% after the pandemic. Just taking the U.S. market, instance, there are about 80 mobile network operators (MNOs) and mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) and switching among them is easy for customers. Not to mention, streaming services are making it easier for customer to drop or minimize their packages with pay TV providers in exchange for quicker and easier viewing experiences.
Underpinning all of this is that telecommunications services, themselves, are indispensable. People rely on internet, cellular and cable TV service to work remotely, stay in touch with loved ones, and inform and entertain themselves. When you’ve invited friends over to watch the big game, you need your cable connection to show up, too. Outages are frustrating, inconvenient and costly. People who can’t work without internet or cellular connections lose income during the downtime, and CSPs lose revenue when dissatisfied customers churn. Almost half (45%) of smartphone user churn is due to poor network coverage.
Delivering consistent service and pricing can be challenging for telecommunications providers. Network outages are difficult to predict—and sometimes caused by bad weather conditions and power blackouts that are impossible to prevent. Bidding wars, such as those between networks and professional sports leagues, impact cable TV pricing. ESPN pays the National Football League $2.7 billion per year for Monday Night Football. When the NFL increases its renewal rates for broadcast packages, that higher cost gets passed along to cable customers.
Consistent Communication Keeps Customers Connected
CSPs cannot control the weather, power grid or sports leagues, but they can control how they communicate with customers. Consistent communication—regarding service outages, price increases and other changes that affect customer experience—is essential for customer satisfaction and retention.
Follow these three best practices to strengthen loyalty among telecom customers.
1. Communicate consistently and proactively for service outages
Customers expect transparency from the companies whose services they use. People understand that problems arise, and they want to be kept in the loop when they do. Proactive notifications keep customers from guessing what’s going on, turning to social channels to self-serve and calling your contact center for answers.
- Immediately notify customers in the affected service area. Send customers timely messages with real-time updates. If you don’t tell customers what’s going on, they may turn to social media for information. That’s where they might encounter incomplete and inaccurate information on the outage that dials up their frustration and stress.
- Include status updates in real-time customer communications. Outages (planned or unplanned) in a particular area should trigger a service outage notification journey that continues until service is restored. Send customers a link to digital channels (web, in-app, etc.) to track progress in resolving the problem or completing the scheduled work.
- Inform your customer service agents. Equip your call center agents with real-time information regarding the status of the network and potential problems customers may encounter. Well-informed agents are better prepared to respond quickly and accurately to complaints and requests for information.
2. Personalize Communications and Offers
Personalized interactions with a brand are the norm. According to a McKinsey survey, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions, and 76% get frustrated when this doesn’t occur. Most consumers say they’re more likely to purchase (76%) and re-purchase (78%) from brands that personalize. Across industries, companies that excel at personalization generate 40 percent more revenue from those activities than average players.
In the highly competitive telecommunications markets, personalization is critical for customer retention and revenue growth. How can you personalize the customer experience?
- Use journey analytics to analyze current behavior, predict future behavior, and determine the best next action. Tailor your messages to the customer’s stage in the lifecycle. For example, offer customers relevant cross-sell packages based on their current behavior (e.g., product usage). For someone who frequently purchases pay-per-view sporting events, this journey provides discounts on a sports channel/package or special deal to encourage loyalty. If you notice a customer changed her last name in the system, offer a discount to add a new phone/line to the cellular plan. For loyal pay-tv customers whose usage is declining, deploy a digital save journey and proactively win back business.
- Optimize omnichannel notifications. If customers aren’t responding to email, try reaching them in another channel that you know is more successful with similar customer personas. Use customer information and journey management to reach out to them in different channels where call to action completion in the past has been successful.
3. Deliver Consistent Messages Across Channels
When customer data and information about outages and special promotions are stored in different systems across your organization—and employees don’t have access to that information—miscommunication is likely. When someone calls to sign up for a promotional offer (received by mail) and the agent often doesn’t know anything about that special deal and the customer is likely to get frustrated. Customers shouldn’t hear about subpar offers and have to tell the agent the details of the offer they received. To be sure this doesn’t happen, notify call center agents about promotional offers, service outages, and other issues that are likely to trigger calls.
To deliver consistent omnichannel notifications, you need a customer experience platform that synthesizes real-time customer data from different systems and departments in your company. When marketing teams, customer service teams and journey orchestration platforms have access to customer journey data, they can recommend and guide customers toward relevant products and services and deliver seamless customer support.
Boost Customer Retention with the Right Customer Engagement Platform
Customer churn will continue to be a headwind for the telecom industry. Competition is fierce and customers have an easier time than ever taking their business elsewhere. But CSPs can tip the scales in their favor by delivering consistent, context-driven communications that make customers feel known. The use cases above are just a few examples. What they all have in common is they leverage insights from your customer data—which the right customer engagement platform can then execute through personalized interactions.
Next, you can dive into one of the biggest difference-makers for telecom customer retention: targeted promotional offers.
Want to see how it works?
You can reduce churn by sending timely, highly personalized offers that customers can’t ignore.
