How to use cognitive intelligence to achieve higher business value

Commercial context

Customer experience challenges to CSPs have never been higher, with users now expecting zero-wait, zero-trouble experiences with sophisticated and consistent interactivity across a range of connected services and applications. Thankfully AI offers CSPs the ability to meet these challenges by understanding customer needs in far greater detail – shifting away from manual surveys and external consultancy, and instead using data intelligence to inform and execute decisions. Emerging network-based AI can now detect slumps in network performance well in advance so issues can be rectified long before the customer is adversely impacted – and this capability can be significantly enhanced when combined with understanding specific needs of each customer. The balance which must of course be struck here, however, is assuring CSPs who make the heavy investments necessary that they will realize tangible benefits.

The answer lies in using cognitive service experience operations for network management – which provide CSPs with unique insights into actions and behaviours to perform network operations fit for each individual customer. This vastly improves levels of assurance, network experience and business capability. Moreover, it also enables CSPs to understand the impact and value of their products, which in many current instances have no way of measuring customer satisfaction, or consequently ROI. Cognitive service experience operations have become a goal of strategic importance for the industry - the difficulty, until now, has been in capturing the intricate customer preferences for such tailored experiences.

The solution

This has been the aim of the Value realization on cognitive service experience operations Catalyst, which realizes a way to determine customer preferences and provide an appropriate network experience. At its core, the Catalyst uses a framework which takes data related to customer actions, such as complaints or ‘dislikes’, and then uses cognitive intelligence capabilities capabilities to associate it with customer segments and causes. These causes are then addressed to produced different outcomes and improved experiences - the resulting customer response is measured to judge whether the service operations has been sufficient. This offers considerable hope to the more than 50% of customer experience professionals working in the telecoms industry who report being unable to prove the ROI value of their projects – and enables CSPs to make the transition from ‘telco to techco’, as they rely less on external experts for decision-making, and more on their own data and technology.

Part of the challenge hitherto has been how to integrate disparate AI technologies, applications and best practices to produce an overarching method to determine insights and execute actions. The Catalyst has remedied this by produced an industry-wide framework for incorporating industry-recommended principles, such as MAMA, AIOps, TCOD, and DT4DI. The framework includes a variety of technologies to assist with this objective, such as digital twins and 5G, with guides on how each can help enhance customer experience and achieve ‘return on experience’ (ROX) – that is, the impact that the customer experience will have on each user.

Results and wider value

By embracing cognitive service experience operations, participating CSPs have achieved a remarkable 15% decrease in the proportion of dissatisfied customer satisfaction (CSAT) full mobile contract (FMC) users. Additionally, in districts affected by poor service quality, fault resolution times have been slashed by an impressive 30%. The average CSAT customer satisfaction score of mobile and home broadband users also improved by 3.9 points over just six months.

This new approach to customer experience management and operations represents a major shift in customer service strategy. By combining multiple AI applications and industry best practices into a single approach, the industry is well-placed to understand its users finely-tuned preferences, but the impression of the overall experience as well. According to Derek Chen, AVP of HK Telecom, “Cognitive intelligence helps the industry think from the customer’s perspective in ways previously unavailable to us. CSPs can use these insights to provide positive reinforcement actions toward customers, and help build trust in and affinity towards us in subtle, yet meaningful ways.”