The telecom Industry has been able to adapt to numerous changes and survive major disruptions. As newer technologies emerge, the biggest and smartest telecom players are adopting these technologies to provide better value to their customers. One of these methods that can change the landscape of telecom is the use of Chatbots. Let’s start by understanding what exactly is a chatbot.

What is a Chatbot?

If we go by the definition, we can define a chatbot as a computer program that engages with users in a text or voice based conversation, imitating human language in its natural format using AI techniques.

Many industries and businesses have adopted chatbots, which allows them to manage many aspects of their business without constant human intervention. Some of the areas where businesses are deploying chatbots are:

• Customer Service
• Business Processes Improvement
• Product Ordering
• Schedule Meetings
• Product Suggestions
• Gathering Metrics

Though these are just some of the ways of utilizing a chatbot, over the last few years, they have been evolving into an entity that determines the success of a business. Telecom has several functions and tasks where chatbots can play an important role in improving the service quality.

For instance, telecom is one industry that, at times, requires frequent communication between the service provider and user. There is a requirement for uninterrupted communication along with ease of access to information. While serving millions of customers, it may not always be possible to yield equal quality to all. With chatbots, it is possible to accomplish the goal of providing quality service to a large volume of customers at the same time.

How can chatbots can add value to the telecom industry?

Let us take a look at how chatbots can add more value to the telecom industry.

1) Improved customer experience: One of the key areas that is vital to the success of any telco is customer service. Using chatbots can bring drastic improvements in providing a positive customer experience. Customer service is evolving, and engaging over a phone call is no longer the only touchpoint customers have.

Long wait times in a call queue could be excruciating, and can massively affect incident response. This is one area where chatbots can yield tremendous benefits apart from providing 24/7 engagement with customers. Instead of going on the usual route of calls, and long wait times, chatbots can engage and answer queries of customers, yet retaining the attributes of human conversational skills. Deploying a chatbot yields the following advantages:

• Ease of access to information
• Reduces waiting time
• Quick response time
• Personalized interaction
• Quick resolution

Instead of responding to a recorded voice, this is a much easier and better way to resolve queries and at the same time offer great customer experience.

Another way of solving or understanding customer problems is by using predictive analytics. A bot will be able to predict possible issues based on the last few activities of the customer. This allows quickly understanding the problem and taking proactive steps to help the customer find a satisfactory resolution.

2) Maximizing business opportunities: Most times the cutthroat competition among telecom companies leads to customers looking for better deals and service. In this scenario, converting possible prospects that visit the company’s website or social media into customers will ensure higher revenue.

Understanding a customer’s reasoning along with search records, bots can assess which plan would be a best match for their needs. Instead of going to a website or app, and skimming through multiple pages of information, the user can talk to a bot and find the appropriate plan. This will allow the telecom company to turn prospects into valuable customers and at the same time save time for the user.

Billing and payment bots can not only help users to keep track of their usage cycle but also send reminders to customers on their outstanding dues, ensuring timely payments and avoiding any late payment charges.

Overall, the combination of analytics and chat bots can help to reduce cost of operations, especially in the support department along with overheads. It can also reduce the chances of human errors and mitigate the need for constant human intervention.

3) Generating feedback: For any business, feedback plays a key role in improving services. Listening, analyzing, and acting can help you to bring customer satisfaction.

Whether the feedback is positive or negative, it has to be analyzed and the satisfaction level of the customers has to be measured on a periodic basis. Feedback bots can, from time to time help your company generate valuable feedback, which can be utilized to constantly improve the services.

Feedback on various aspects of the business can be generated through various communication touchpoints. Based on the feedback; changes can be implemented to improve user experience and customer satisfaction.

4) Cross Selling: Believe it or not, the telecom industry sustains itself not just by adding new customers but also by cross selling add-on services that can enhance the usage of the customer and ultimately lead to customer satisfaction. Chatbots can give suggestions on better plans that are available based on the usage and give instructions on how to activate those add-on services.

5) Marketing Tool: Every telecom company needs to have a great marketing tool. Chatbots can interact well on social media platforms, and this is a great way to interact with your audience. Chatbots can be used as representatives that can give intuitive replies to personalize the interaction, thus making the entire experience pleasant. This will encourage users to interact and be more interested in your marketing campaigns.

eInfochips focuses on understanding business needs and improving them through custom chatbot development. Having worked with several telecom companies, we understand the industry challenges and can help you in implementing solutions that will add more value to your business. For more details, please get in touch.