5 challenges telco contact center agents face that undermine customer experience

With the novel coronavirus sweeping the globe, nearly every communication service provider (CSP) in the world has had no choice but to shift its entire contact center workforce to work-from-home (WFH). In WFH mode, agents tangle with the same complexity and manual procedures they did in the office, now by VPN and home broadband. The day to day complexities agents navigate can be a hurdle for CSPs to achieve the world-class customer experience (CX) they want, especially with WFH as the prevailing model.

Here are five common challenges contact center agents can face that CX leaders want to solve:

1. Too many systems, yet there are always more

For any given order, an agent might need to work with separate ordering, provisioning, billing and scheduling systems to run a process or gather status information. As CSPs enter partnerships and make acquisitions, the number of systems can increase as agents navigate partner catalogs and acquired provisioning stacks. Whatever the root cause, agents encounter more systems, rules and procedures to get the job done.

2. Measured for efficiency, yet tasked with manual procedures

Agents are typically measured by how fast they resolve issues, how well they connect emotionally with customers, and whether customers feel they’ve had a positive experience. But they navigate manual logins across multiple systems to repeat task-oriented procedures that do not help them move faster or serve customers better.

Examples of procedural tasks agents might inherit include:

• Keying duplicate orders into different systems


• Making account adjustments in the correct billing system


• Checking appointment status in a dispatching system


• Submitting a trouble ticket to the right support desk


• Logging notes and emailing cut-and-paste follow ups to customers

3. Now the office is home

Many CSPs moved their contact center agent workforces home in response to the pandemic. Agents face practical challenges as a result like finding a private place to work and being responsible for equipment moved home from the office that IT normally maintains. Agents must maintain their home phone and internet connections to do their jobs too. At the same time, they have to learn new systems, look after customers and try to hit their performance targets.

4. More new products and devices are always coming

Most CSPs are under pressure to innovate, introduce new offers and sell the latest devices. Anything new needs support, so contact center agents are always exposed to what’s new. Even as CSPs simplify their product catalogs, agents will bear customers’ reactions to change. Yet agents often must rely on recall and how fast they can look up information in the correct systems to help confused or aggrieved customers struggling with change.

As exhibited in the TM Forum Cognitive Contact Center Catalyst, CSPs are now adopting RPA and AI to automate prompts that can help agents manage the deluge of data, communicate with customers and to automate processes like ordering, appointment booking and service recovery.

5. Exposed to the battle for customer data

Customer information is targeted by hackers and identity thieves worldwide. Key CSP processes, like number porting and mobile device unlocking, are attacked in schemes like subscription fraud and digital bank account takeover for the full insight. Cloud native has been at the center of telecoms commentary for some time, and there is little doubt it is the future of most telecoms software. We asked some communications service providers (CSPs) how they are progressing with their cloudification efforts.

Many enterprise organizations are much further down the road than CSPs regarding the adoption of public cloud, but this is because CSPs are fundamentally different to all other types of technology-led companies. Also, there is a distinction to be made between CSPs’ old and new motives for cloudification which is integral to the telecoms cloud story.

The traditional telco was not overly constrained by capital resources, and had a stable core business model and little need for radical innovation. Those revenues and margins are increasingly threatened to the point that fundamental change is necessary to diversify CSP businesses and generate new, large revenue streams from non-traditional services.

Cloud migration has a long way to go

In the decade after 2010, some CSPs experimented with the ‘lift and shift’ approach to migrating applications that were not designed for the cloud into private or hybrid cloud to save CapEx and OpEx. They quickly realized that the expected savings might not be realized. Another consideration in these early experiments was that little, if any, commercial-off-the-shelf software that could be considered cloud native, so CSPs began working more closely with technology providers to address this fundamental shift. Today there is still much to do because of the scale of the task, and CSPs’ need to get as good a return on investment as possible from their old infrastructure. In a recent survey for TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Tracker 5, we asked several hundred CSPs about the migration of their business and operations to cloud. The graph above shows that the move is underway, but only a small percentage of IT workloads have been migrated to the public cloud (although public cloud does not cover all cloud deployment models, it is a good measure of overall cloud migration. The timeline for cloud to become the dominant installed model of telecoms software is long.

In most conversations we had with CSPs for this research, it became evident that the growth of cloud deployments will continue, but some IT workloads will never be migrated to a cloud model. CSPs are generally taking a pragmatic approach to this realization and are developing a hybrid long-term strategy, migrating functions that have obvious cloud native futures and building a solid interoperability plan for the rest.

However, in the same survey close to 20% of operator respondents state they do not have a clear preference for a cloud native approach which is more than expected. The group of participants was selected widely from many different sizes of operators, we often see Tier 3 and 4 CSPs letting early adopter Tier 1’s establish best practice before making their own investments. This result could be symptomatic of that pause before smaller operators establish their own cloud strategy.

Are CSPs seeing total cost of ownership benefits?

The prospects of new revenue opportunities for CSPs in the 2020’s are brighter than they have been for decades with investments in 5G and IoT lighting the path to new service models and use cases across previously untapped industry verticals.

The promising economics of 5G and IoT are driving the transformation of most CSPs and means they are not mirroring legacy data center deployments in the cloud but building something entirely new. This new build is not only for the CSPs’ use because the new business and operational models are based on collaborative, multi-partner business models in a B2B2X setting that involves consumers, businesses, government agencies and other entities.

Now there is economic motivation for those CSPs investing in cloud native software because it can:

• Use the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model and therefore has usage-based pricing models
• Run in the public cloud (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure)
• Empower them to create new business cases and experiment with new potential lines of business
• Future-proof functional capabilities and their digital operations
• Improve legacy operational systems and processes

Cloud native is not a Tier 1, multi-region strategy

Most CSPs are adopting a cloud native approach to new and future OSS/BSS procurements. Aligned with that, success stories are appearing across the industry from smaller, single-country CSPs and operators. In additional to this, service providers that are providing connectivity solutions to industry-specific customers (for example, private networks for airports) are realizing the benefit of cloud native deployment models for their custom networks, operational and even retail environments. As such it is important to see the migration to cloud as a much wider macro-trend than multinational mobile network operator groups experimenting with new technology. We spoke to an African operator that has many hundreds of product categories and is planning to move a large number of its workloads to a public cloud set-up. The main driver for this is to increase competitive agility as the company adds subscribers and modernizes the product line, and most of all, to speed up operations for the full portfolio. The first workloads to be addressed are in revenue management for billing, rating, charging, and partner settlement. The company has fewer than 10 million subscribers so it does not have the complex organizational structure of a large multi-country group where a category of products or line of business can be addressed at once based on strategic value perceived by its shareholders.