How did Covid-19 change the customer experience?

The telecoms industry was quite rightly proud of how it kept networks up and running during the Covid-19 pandemic. This was despite massive shifts in telecoms traffic away from business districts and into residential areas, an upsurge in demand for new and faster broadband connections, and having to adjust to staff doing their jobs remotely.

We heard business leaders say that there had been more progress in digitalization during several months of lockdown than in several previous years of business as usual.

But what about the digitization of customers’ relationships with their service providers? Did this go through the same sort of transformation? Certainly, the number of digital interactions increased during lockdowns. They had to as operators closed shops and relocated call-center staff to home-working environments. But was customers’ experience of using these digital channels a good one? Did it change how they manage their relationships for good or have customers gone back to their previous habits since countries have opened back up?

We can get some insights from customer surveys conducted during and after lockdowns.

A survey from the Capgemini Research Institute published in September 2020 – and with the research conducted during the first lockdowns – sought to address “How telecoms operators can reconnect with their customers and emerge stronger from the pandemic”. Its survey of 6,300 consumers across Europe and North America found that only 48% of customers believed that the services they currently received met their connectivity requirements.

The survey also gave insights into customers’ perception of operators’ digital channels. It found that before the pandemic 49% of respondents had a high frequency of interaction with operators’ digital channels for browsing and purchasing, with a slightly lower figure (37%) accessing digital channels to access help and support. Expected usage of these digital channels for the following 6-9 months (ie during the pandemic) rose by only one percentage point for both questions. Interestingly, Capgemini’s survey on usage of mobile and Internet banking showed an eight-percentage-point increase compared with pre-pandemic levels.

So, we can tentatively conclude from this that even in the midst of the pandemic there was no great rush – or desire to rush – to make greater use of digital channels. Telecoms operators’ digital channels – and increasingly, their digital apps – are used for bill-checking bills or account balances, and are important when customers are looking to upgrade or buy a new service, but are not used extensively for handling more complex technical, account or billing issues.

Management consulting firm EY surveyed 20,000 households in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK and the US in February 2022 about their communications services habits, preferences and relationships with their customers, This was 18 months or so after the Capgemini survey and just as societies were coming out of lockdown.

While 34% of respondents said that they considered the self-service options provided by CSPs during the pandemic to be useful and effective, 50% neither agreed or disagreed, and 16% disagreed. As to whether they felt more confident using self-service channels to resolve customer issues as a result of the lockdown, 32% agreed, 23% disagreed and 45% neither agreed nor disagreed.

These responses – coupled with the one rom the earlier Capgemini – seem to paint a similar picture, namely that digital channels provide a useful service but in no way could the industry claim that they are in the process of becoming the preferred, or dominant, customer channel. Indeed, another set of responses from the EY survey shows just how embedded the call center is in the minds of CSP customers. The percentage of people stating a preference for using call centers to resolve issues relating to their mobile accounts actually increased between 2021 and 2022. More than half of respondents stated a preference for using call centers to set up their devices, addressing technical or network issues, billing enquiries and changes in services and price plans. The same was true for broadband although numbers showed a very small decline between 20201 and 2021.

As telecoms operators consider the next steps in improving their digital experiences – within the context of their overall strategies and ambitions – they will need to decide whether they are satisfied with the speed of adoption of digital touchpoints and the limited ways in which they are being used.