B2B customer experience now vital in telecoms

In an age of height­ened con­sumer expec­ta­tions, the dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion of many organ­i­sa­tions, the com­modi­ti­sa­tion of tele­coms prod­ucts, as well as the fall­out from the glob­al pan­dem­ic, have all had a pro­found effect on cus­tomer expe­ri­ence. Right now, in busi­ness-to busi­ness tele­coms, CX has become the sin­gle biggest fac­tor dri­ving cus­tomer loy­al­ty, and there­fore rev­enue growth.

A num­ber of fac­tors are dri­ving pro­found change. Many busi­ness lead­ers are get­ting younger, with Mil­len­ni­als and Gen Z ris­ing through the ranks. These dig­i­tal natives are rais­ing the bar for oper­a­tors. They are impa­tient and have zero tol­er­ance for poor ser­vice, expect­ing to be served on their own terms, whether via self- or auto­mat­ed-ser­vice or through in-per­son ser­vice agents.

“Cus­tomer demand is chang­ing mas­sive­ly, we now have a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion mov­ing into posi­tions of pow­er. If they don’t get a good expe­ri­ence they move their busi­ness else­where. At the same time, tel­cos are sit­ting on a lot of tech­ni­cal debt and lega­cy sys­tems as they try to ful­fil this need – this is why they need to get their act togeth­er rel­a­tive­ly quick­ly,” says Dirk Grote, direc­tor indus­try advi­so­ry for com­mu­ni­ca­tions EMEA at Sales­force.

Busi­ness-to busi­ness (B2B) play­ers now show atti­tudes once reserved for the con­sumer mar­ket. Con­ve­nience and sim­plic­i­ty are key words. Height­ened expec­ta­tions are also ram­pant for enter­prise cus­tomers all the way through to the small-to-medi­um enter­prise (SME) sec­tor. Tel­cos are being mea­sured against the likes of Net­flix or Ama­zon, which are com­plete­ly unre­lat­ed busi­ness­es, yet they shape expec­ta­tions glob­al­ly.

“B2B buy­ers in the evening, when they stop work­ing, become con­sumers. As they use a lot of these types of ser­vices there is then a high­er expec­ta­tion for per­son­alised ser­vices. At the same time there is a cost pres­sure for tele­coms providers. This is pulling them in the oth­er direc­tion. The ques­tion is how do you deal with oppos­ing forces in a suc­cess­ful way?” says Sami Helin, glob­al account direc­tor at Cov­eo.

A lot of long-estab­lished, incum­bent tel­cos play­ers have issues deliv­er­ing one-to-one, cus­tomer ser­vices that dig­i­tal-first, dis­rup­tive and data-pow­ered inno­va­tors find eas­i­er to achieve. Lega­cy sys­tems, com­plex prod­uct and ser­vice port­fo­lios, across mul­ti­ple acquired com­pa­nies plague many tele­com com­pa­nies. The cost of trans­form­ing and uni­fy­ing every­thing with cus­tomer data at the core would be too cost­ly and take too much time. This can result in poor cus­tomer expe­ri­ence.

Cus­tomer demand is chang­ing mas­sive­ly, we now have a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion mov­ing into posi­tions of pow­er. If they don’t get a good expe­ri­ence they move their busi­ness else­where.

“There are huge lev­els of reme­di­a­tion to be done. We’ve all expe­ri­enced this. A lot of the tel­cos are try­ing to go dig­i­tal-first. How­ev­er, dur­ing the pan­dem­ic a huge mir­ror was held up to organ­i­sa­tions. When con­tact cen­tres were shut down and peo­ple were sent home, it was a very true reflec­tion of an organisation’s capa­bil­i­ty. Cus­tomers expe­ri­enced how good, bad or indif­fer­ent a company’s self-ser­vice and dig­i­tal expe­ri­ences were and how agile their oper­a­tions were,” says Rob All­man, vice pres­i­dent for cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at NTT Ltd.

A shift to customer-centricity in B2B

How­ev­er, tele­coms providers are evolv­ing at pace in order to answer the needs of their busi­ness cus­tomers. They are map­ping out cus­tomer jour­neys, busi­ness­es bet­ter under­stand what cus­tomers want through mar­ket research, data ana­lyt­ics and feed­back. There is a real­i­sa­tion that action­able data on cus­tomers is cru­cial if tele­coms play­ers are to up their game. In the B2B space, where there are a lot of com­plex ser­vices and prod­ucts, it is also about know­ing what to offer and when.

“Peo­ple need to have an intu­itive expe­ri­ence that is sup­port­ing their day-to-day rather than be bom­bard­ed with a tsuna­mi of tech­nol­o­gy, which can cre­ate more suf­fo­ca­tion than sup­port. This is real­ly impor­tant to bear in mind. We need to help human beings use the tech­nol­o­gy and not to be paral­ysed by it,” says Ruk­mi­ni Glanard, exec­u­tive vice pres­i­dent for glob­al sales, ser­vices and mar­ket­ing at Alca­tel Lucent Enter­prise.

The glob­al pan­dem­ic was an accel­er­a­tion event in this regard. It spurred on the adop­tion of more dig­i­talised ser­vices, self-ser­vice and automation.At the same time, Covid-19 also revealed the lack of resilien­cy in many organ­i­sa­tions, specif­i­cal­ly in how tele­coms providers engage with busi­ness cus­tomers and deliv­er dif­fer­en­ti­at­ed expe­ri­ences.

“It has pro­vid­ed impe­tus to think about things in a dif­fer­ent way. The pan­dem­ic has cer­tain­ly accel­er­at­ed the con­sumeri­sa­tion of the B2B space. It now has to be dig­i­tal first. But it needs to be dig­i­tal first in a way that the basic stuff is real­ly seam­less, the basics must work. Then you use human inter­ac­tions to real­ly aug­ment the over­all expe­ri­ence,” says Katy Pearce, head of cus­tomer expe­ri­ence at Voda­fone Busi­ness.

One focus for Voda­fone Busi­ness has been to assist SMEs, many of which had to piv­ot sig­nif­i­cant­ly when the pan­dem­ic hit, to become dig­i­tal-only oper­a­tors when routes to tra­di­tion­al mar­ket were closed. Some did not have a web­site, oth­ers had only a lim­it­ed online pres­ence. Covid shift­ed this sec­tor dra­mat­i­cal­ly, as well as boost­ed its depen­dence on tele­coms ser­vices.

“Remem­ber small­er busi­ness­es don’t have a whole IT depart­ment, they don’t have sep­a­rate peo­ple that under­stand secu­ri­ty, cloud ser­vices or con­nec­tiv­i­ty. They are just try­ing to run their busi­ness­es. It’s there­fore about help­ing these busi­ness­es use tech­nol­o­gy in the best way pos­si­ble. The pan­dem­ic has been a mas­sive wake up call, not just for tel­cos but for all busi­ness­es,” says Pearce.

The pan­dem­ic also cre­at­ed new chal­lenges in B2B rela­tion­ships for some tele­coms providers. The shift to remote and hybrid work­ing meant that few­er busi­ness mobile hand­sets and desk­top phones were need­ed. If more employ­ees use Zoom, Teams or Google Hang­out, deploy­ing more uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions solu­tions, they don’t need as many phys­i­cal devices.

“Even when busi­ness­es returned to the office they con­tin­ued to use uni­fied com­mu­ni­ca­tions. This was a big chal­lenge for us, if few­er peo­ple use phones we don’t need to pro­duce as many. We had to be very fast and cre­ative by invent­ing some­thing new. For instance, we now have a cord­less phone that con­nects via USB to a com­put­er that employ­ees can now use with Teams or Zoom,” says Jörg Brühl, senior vice pres­i­dent for mar­ket­ing at Gigaset.

“Cer­tain­ly, we need a lot more speed with­in our busi­ness cycles, we need the inge­nu­ity and the excel­lence of our engi­neers to trans­late the demands of our cus­tomers into tech­nol­o­gy with­in our prod­ucts.”

A vital year ahead for business-focused telecoms

Where are the oppor­tu­ni­ties with­in the B2B space for tele­coms? If providers are to become trust­ed part­ners – which appears to be what all play­ers want – they will have to add a lot more val­ue, up their game, and pro­vide more human-cen­tred ser­vices.

The first hur­dle is for tel­cos to make it easy to do busi­ness, by resolv­ing prob­lems and issues at light­ning speed. No busi­nessper­son wants to spend days on a phone to a call cen­tre to address a tele­coms fault or get caught in an unre­solved query online. Every­one wants their con­nec­tiv­i­ty glitch dealt with instant­ly, oth­er­wise it can cost cor­po­ra­tions busi­ness and mon­ey.

“It’s about three things: sim­plic­i­ty, sim­plic­i­ty, sim­plic­i­ty. How do we make the user feel he or she is gain­ing time in their dai­ly tasks? Peo­ple don’t expect to fight against tech­nol­o­gy, they expect tech­nol­o­gy to adapt to what they need,” says Mous­sa Zagh­doud, exec­u­tive vice-pres­i­dent, cloud com­mu­ni­ca­tion busi­ness divi­sion, Alca­tel Lucent Enter­prise.

There were fears before the pan­dem­ic that tel­cos were becom­ing com­modi­tised very quick­ly, where price was the main deter­mi­nant for most prod­ucts and ser­vices. Per­haps, Covid shift­ed the dial. Tel­cos now play a role sim­i­lar to that of util­i­ties com­pa­nies; they are tak­en for grant­ed, yet when they’re turned off, cus­tomers realise how cru­cial they real­ly are.

The next year or so is there­fore a key time for tele­coms providers to prove they offer a vital util­i­ty, add val­ue to people’s busi­ness and up their game. “The biggest oppor­tu­ni­ty com­ing out of the pan­dem­ic is the per­ceived rel­e­vance of con­nec­tiv­i­ty. There is now a turn around when it comes to rel­e­vance. Every­one realis­es that tele­coms are a life­line for their busi­ness or con­sumer lives,” says Grote.

Tele­coms providers will need to be proac­tive in this process, con­tact­ing busi­ness users, mobil­is­ing data and pro­vid­ing a more per­son­alised expe­ri­ence. “If there are issues, reach­ing out to cus­tomers and resolv­ing them is cru­cial. Peo­ple wel­come that. This proac­tive approach changes the whole shape of the expe­ri­ence if you are on the front foot, and you are get­ting in touch with peo­ple. Try­ing to antic­i­pate issues or points of sat­is­fac­tion, renew­al and poten­tial growth; this is crit­i­cal,” says All­man.

In the end, there is no dif­fer­ence between B2B and B2C we just have human rela­tions that we are man­ag­ing, and tech­nol­o­gy will help us to pro­vide the best user expe­ri­ence

Cer­tain­ly, the use of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (AI) and machine learn­ing can help, as can a more cus­tomer-cen­tric approach, where tele­coms ser­vices and prod­ucts are reengi­neered with the cus­tomer at the fore­front and cen­tre. Design think­ing is cru­cial here.

“Smart AI tech­nol­o­gy can also now under­stand where every­thing is with­in lega­cy and siloed sys­tems and can serve the rel­e­vant infor­ma­tion to the cus­tomer. Tel­cos sales­peo­ple can now do their job bet­ter if they have access to real-time infor­ma­tion about the cus­tomers, ser­vices and pric­ing. Cus­tomers can also have a con­sumer grade expe­ri­ence. Today, this can now be pro­vid­ed by machine learn­ing with­out hav­ing to trans­form all of the back-end sys­tems,” Helin says.

Tele­coms providers can also learn from what has been deployed at the cut­ting edge of con­sumer mar­kets and imple­ment these strate­gies with­in B2B sales. Adding val­ue will also depend on tak­ing a more human approach to tele­coms or specif­i­cal­ly an aug­ment­ed strat­e­gy where cus­tomer ser­vice per­son­nel work hand-in-glove with tech­nol­o­gy plat­forms.

“We’ve just pro­vid­ed self-ser­vice to con­sumers, so why shouldn’t we do the same for busi­ness cus­tomers? They are also humans. In the end, there is no dif­fer­ence between B2B and B2C we just have human rela­tions that we are man­ag­ing, and tech­nol­o­gy will help us to pro­vide the best user expe­ri­ence,” says Nils Stamm, chief dig­i­tal offi­cer for Deutsche Telekom.

There­in lies the oppor­tu­ni­ty for adding val­ue in the busi­ness mar­ket for tele­coms and cus­tomer expe­ri­ence, if providers are to become trust­ed part­ners they have to get the bal­ance right between automa­tion, agent inter­ac­tion and deliv­er­ing on what real­ly mat­ters to busi­ness­es.

It is a fine bal­ance.

To find out more please vis­it coveo.com and salesforce.com

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