This article was first published in The Fast Mode.
With MWC Barcelona taking place this week at the Fira Gran Via, Ariana Lynn, Principal Analyst at The Fast Mode spoke to Jukka Heiska, CMO of Qvantel on the company's participation at the event.
Ariana: What are some of the key themes of this year's MWC?
Jukka: AI is everywhere at MWC this year. Almost every stand has some form of AI messaging. But it’s important to look at the use cases which will provide the best return on investment and quick wins for CSPs. Customer care is the obvious place to start as it’s a real issue for many CSPs.
Also with CSPs increasing their portfolios and selling a range of services from insurance to security to electricity and many more, the questions that customer care agents are going to get asked are only going to become more diverse.
Using an AI copilot to help customer care agents answer questions can only help. Many CSPs have customer care call wait times of well over two minutes and first call completion rates of around 40%, so it’s clear that any assistance that AI can have in improving these numbers will benefit customers and CSPs alike.
Ariana: What are some of the events that Qvantel has lined up? Any showcases?
Jukka: Our no/low code approach to BSS is picking up some significant traction and we’re gaining new customers, one of which we’ll be highlighting at MWC. We’ll also be showing our Qvantel Flex Customer Care Copilot. This is an AI-driven copilot that is integrated into our customer care function.
It can be used to answer questions when a customer is engaging with a chatbot and use the customer information to route the call to the most appropriate agent based on the questions asked, language, and/or sentiment analysis.
The AI copilot can AI provide the agent with a smart briefing of the interaction history and customer intent, as well as provide ready-made suggestions for the response and next best actions. We are seeing a huge demand from CSPs wanting to see demos and find out more, so using AI to support customer care looks like a hot topic.
Furthermore, Qvantel Flex BSS is designed to have the AI-driven Copilot integrated with the no/low code configurability of the platform, enabling the CSP to be in control of the business processes they use to run their business and the customer experience.
Ariana: What's the outlook for telecoms, specifically the mobile industry in the next 12 months?
Jukka: I’d say there’s a degree of optimism. Many of our customers are enjoying significant double-digit growth rates by diversifying and selling a wide range of digital products and services to their customer bases. As CSPs sell more services and look to get a bigger percentage of their customers’ digital spend and not just telecoms spend, there’s increased focus on ensuring that CSPs deliver the best customer experience at all touch points.
This helps build trust which makes it easier for CSPs to sell new services to their customers. This, plus the increased momentum for system openness and agility is having a knock-on effect on the BSS industry, which is starting to enjoy a renaissance as many CSPs are replacing old legacy stacks with new cloud-native, open, no/low code solutions.
