Depending on how you pronounce it, ‘ai’ could mean love in Mandarin or Japanese (爱).

But we can safely say that everyone ‘爱’s’ AI at MWC 2024. Almost every exhibitor we came across there had something to say or present about AI.

As both a communications service provider (CSP) and telco software provider with experience in providing customer experiences (CX) and customer service, here’s our observations for how AI is changing the CX game for our industry.

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Cautious Optimism Among Telco Players

Ambitious Proofs of Concept

While everyone had something to say about AI, some ideas were more ambitious than others.

Here are some of the more ambitious AI ideas we took note of:

• AI-powered fully automated telco service
• Two-way conversational commerce - replaces the current search and recommendation-driven ‘storefront’ with automated conversational interfaces
• App-less interfaces where screens and apps are replaced with voice interfaces

These ‘hype’ use cases are still in the proof of concept phase, and we noted that the industry felt like large language models (LLMs) powering generative AI (Gen AI) are not mature enough yet to provide accurate responses in a telco context. To address this lack of maturity, there is growing investment in grounding or verticalizing LLMs with telco-specific data.

On the other hand, AI’s been making leaps and bounds in progress. ChatGPT’s unveiling just a few years ago looked like something straight out of the ‘Jetsons’ TV-show and LLMs have just been getting more and more powerful. We’re sure that these ambitions are growing closer to becoming reality each day.

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Customer Care Was Among AI’s Wider Uses at MWC 2024

While these proofs of concept are exciting, more players in the telco industry were looking at more tried and tested ideas. Here are some ideas specific to customer experience and customer service that we noted:
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Customer service automation

AI-driven chatbots and virtual assistants to handle customer queries without routing to an agent and also boost first call resolution.

Telco service providers, or CSPs, are also primarily deploying AI in specific, controlled ways, like copilots for customer service agents.

Some examples we saw at MWC 2024 highlighted a 50% boost to first call resolution using AI-powered chatbots.

Personalising communications at scale

Gen AI can help make traditionally rules-based chatbots more human-like and effective.

Operations Excellence

Detection and forecasting to improve existing processes.

These ideas have clear merit. From one of our earlier surveys, great customer service ranks high on the list of what makes a telco ‘premium’ among telco consumers. An IBM survey noted that 97 percent of communications service providers said conversational AI improved customer satisfaction.

McKinsey noted that AI-enabled customer service has also been noted to create better service, higher satisfaction, and increased customer engagement. Below is their model for the stages of an AI-supported customer-service process adjusted for telecommunications providers:

AI and Customer Service The Circles Way

With all this excitement surrounding AI, we’re also developing AI projects of our own. We take our customer experience seriously and have been using that experience and data to develop an AI-enabled customer service project for telcos. 

We’re building this with plenty of benefits in mind for both customers and telco businesses themselves. While the project’s name is still a secret, we can share what features we’re planning for it and how it ties into the framework above.

Here’s a sneak peak of what we’re working on:

1 Day Launch on All Touchpoints
‍Enable it via on-app tab or a website add-on at low cost and low risk.

1 Click Smartness
‍Simply upload your FAQ to start reducing tickets by 50%.

Multilingual Support
‍Serve diverse customer bases in their preferred language.

Highly Personalised
‍One of the things it can do is recommend plans based on users’ needs while comparing it to expected benefits of your telco’s competitors and more.

First Contact Customer Resolution
‍We aim to give customers instant response and troubleshooting for most routine queries. 

Conversational Support and True Resolution
‍Trained on real-life telco data, it’ll keep interactions conversational and compliant.

Real-time Data and Performance Measurement
‍The project will automatically gather surveys and feedback from customers.

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This is just the start of what this project and many others that we’re working on will be capable of. Stay tuned for more!

To us, AI is exciting and holds a lot of potential for the telco space. But we also understand that tools can only reach their true potential based on the skill and care of the ones using it. 

On our end, we’ll continue to monitor how new trends in AI and technology will impact telco customer service and work on evolving together with it.

Want to find out more about this project or what we do?

Contact us today!