47% of complaints from customers to their mobile operators are about network related issues, such as loss of service outages or poor connection speed. For fixed broadband operators that figure jumps to 66%*. But often customer care agents and bots don’t have access to the network data to give a reason for the network issues and have no idea when the issue is going to be fixed. Maybe this would explain why only 43% of customer care calls are resolved on the first call for mobile operators and an even more depressing figure of 39% for fixed broadband operators.
This all leads to unhappy customers, increased customer care costs, low NPs and unhappy staff. At the same time, AI is continuing to develop on a daily basis and operators are now starting to look at use cases where AI can improve the performance and efficiency. Identifying and fixing network incidents is one area where AI can deliver improved network performance, but also has the significant knock-on effect of reducing customer care calls by proactively identifying and fixing network issues before the customer has even noticed.
At Digital Transformation World 24 Qvantel will participate in the TM Forum Copilot Incident Management Catalyst project. This will showcase AI driven incident identification and resolution and can deliver significant benefits to the customer care processes and network operations centre in operators. Plus, there’s the main benefit of delivering a better customer care and network experience.
There will always be cases where customers experience network incidents and contact customer care. Here the customer care system leverages APIs to get real-time information from the AI supported network incident agent so care representatives and care bots can best answer any questions about network incidents. They can also provide customers with updates about ongoing network incidents and the progress of resolutions, fostering transparency and trust between CSPs and their customers.
CSPs are already starting to roll out GenAI supported customer care copilots. Leading analyst firm McKinsey has predicted that GenAI can improve customer care productivity by up to 40%. By using AI to help identify and resolve the main cause of calls to customer care could dramatically reduce the number of care calls. Giving care agents the correct prompts and suggested actions for network incident related calls could also see a significant increase in first call resolution rates. This could mean that the forecast 40% increase in customer care productivity could be here a lot quicker than anyone anticipated.
If you’re visiting DTW in Copenhagen, please visit the Catalyst project area where I can show how the Copilot Incident could be set to revolutionize the customer care experience.
*Source: Ofcom: Comparing customer service – mobile, landline and home broadband survey results (May 2023)
Bahaar Ghorbani
Product Portfolio Manager
