Service providers are trying to come up with more innovative solutions as a way to improve and enhance their customer relationships, which can lead to more loyalty and differentiation among enterprise telecoms, observes GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Robert Pritchard, Senior Analyst at GlobalData, said: “ICT providers have always claimed to offer great customer service, but the challenges of offering 360-degree visibility and control have become ever more complex with the proliferation of new products – especially as many security, cloud, and unified communications solutions are offered in partnership with third parties.”

It is widely recognized that good customer service engenders loyalty and can add to the top and bottom lines. GlobalData’s monitoring of market research trends finds that an increase of 5% in customer satisfaction can equate to up to 25% more profit. The trend of enabling customers to manage their services through online portals enhances the market as it provides them with the agility to flex and manage their services directly. This also offers potential cost savings for service providers using automated technology platforms rather than expensive human intervention.

Pritchard continued: “Recently, innovations such as shared risk and co-development have become more common, offering both the opportunity for better end-customer experience, but also the threat of reputational and financial damage if things go wrong.”

In parallel with strategic challenges like Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG), differentiated customer service can only be successfully delivered when it is imbued in corporate culture from C-Suite to engineer. Systems, processes, and organizations also have to interlink seamlessly and increasingly with those of third-party suppliers and partners.

Pritchard concluded: “Using customer service as a differentiator is a great opportunity, but also a substantial challenge – one that cannot be ignored.”