The Role of Telco Software and Customer Experience in Churn Reduction and Loyalty

In an industry facing shrinking B2C connectivity revenues and stiff competition, great customer experiences that keep customers loyal are key to keeping your telco competitive: 

In light of this, the telco industry has been working hard to shake off its old reputation for poor service. Previously, the telco industry was previously known for complicated contracts that favored the telco, confusing products designed to deter price comparisons, and rebates to bait users into purchases before seeing that they were made intentionally hard to redeem.³

In 2014, Circles set out to develop a fully digital telco customer experience and a telco operating system that gives power back to the consumers. Here’s what we’ve learned about software’s role in telco customer loyalty. 

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The Software-Customer Experience Connection

To give control back to consumers, we built the customer experience around five key pillars:

Software plays a key role in these pillars, from the first interaction when choosing a plan online, to onboarding and interacting with customer support.

However, when we searched for software vendors who could help us provide this experience, we realized that integrating everything together would be too complicated and time-consuming. That’s when we decided to build our full-stack software to support our vision.

We wanted to build a digital mobile operator brand that offers a fully digital experience to our customers. That means they will be interfacing with our website and mobile app as there would be no physical stores to visit. That would spell disaster if they cannot get a seamless, delightful experience. 

These are the principles and standards for our software and customer happiness teams that we’ve refined over the years:

Onboarding: Setting the Right Tone

First impressions matter, and our onboarding process is designed to delight customers. We streamlined activation and port-in processes to require as little information as possible. 

This resulted in an optimized process that can be finished in less than five minutes with careful step-by-step guidance and personalized communication for new customers.x

App Experience: Streamlined and Personalized

The app must be transparent, intuitive, and give customers complete control over their mobile plans.

Achieving this requires a clean, user-friendly design for the app and website, ensuring key information is available at a glance. Personalization is vital for the app experience, with features tailored to individual plan usage and customer segments continuously refined through data-driven insights.

This principle also requires our team to focus on building cycles of delight and infatuation at different parts of the app experience.

Billing: Transparent and Intuitive

Studies have shown that billing-related satisfaction influences telco customer switching behavior.⁴

To prevent bill-related dissatisfaction, the billing experience and product offers must be clear and transparent with kindergarten-level clarity so that customers know exactly how much their plans cost.

Customer Service: Proactive and Efficient

Our customer service team has a high customer satisfaction score (CSAT) commitment to resolving issues with speed and empathy. Our team has month-to-date tracking of the CSAT score and activates training to recover the CSAT scores in cases where the score falls below a certain threshold. We also review key metrics like average handle time (AHT), first response time (FRT), and chatbot performance multiple times a day.

Our customer service teams also perform proactive outreach to solve network or billing issues before customers notice.

These principles for onboarding, app experience, billing, customer service, and a culture of empathy and cross-functional collaboration have enabled us to deliver a seamless, customer-centric experience that distinguishes us in the highly competitive telco market.

Data-Driven Insights for Personalization and Refined Experiences

It is bad when telcos fail to listen to their users, and it is worse when they push services they prioritize rather than services that actually meet their customers’ needs.

Proper listening and responding to customers is the foundation of delivering personalized experiences. McKinsey research demonstrates that mastering personalization unlocks greater customer value at every step of the user journey.

By consolidating customer information into an integrated data lake, your telco can get a 360° view of your customer. By unifying real-time information from sources like your website, app, billing systems, and CRM, you can create a 360° view of each customer. This comprehensive perspective eliminates data silos and enables more personalized interactions and targeted campaigns.

This enables your telcos build microsegments and launch personalized email campaigns to them. You can read more about how this powered an email campaign that brought in a 15 percent improvement in open rates and a 102 percent increase in our push notifications click rate here.

In addition to centralized data, augmenting insights with external sources like social sentiment analysis, app reviews, and churn/grace period studies provides a deeper understanding of customer behavior. Customer surveys, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES), and drop-off surveys further refine insights, enabling telcos to improve customer experience at every touchpoint.

Embracing real-time data also empowers telcos to deliver proactive service. For example, addressing potential issues like first-bill shock before they escalate helps build trust, improves satisfaction, and reduces churn. By prioritizing personalization and real-time insights, telcos can create seamless, customer-centric experiences that drive long-term loyalty.

Agility in Action: Launching New In-demand Products Rapidly

Not launching products that your customers demand fast enough results in lost revenue. An integrated full-stack software solution helps launch products in minutes compared to traditional legacy telco software that can take weeks or months.

Tight collaboration between your marketing team, product, tech, and customer service teams together with the right software will let you respond to customer feedback quickly, like in this example:

Our older, loyal customers expressed frustration that newer customers were getting cheaper, higher value plans. Meanwhile, it was difficult for them to migrate to those plans making them feel neglected.

After hearing this feedback, we adapted with both short term and long term measures. We initially addressed the issue through manual optimization before enhancing our software to streamline the process. This helped give our older clients more control over the value of their plans and encouraged them to stay with us.

Loyalty That Goes Beyond Transactions

We came across one surprising finding as we were going through our research and customer data: customer loyalty is about more than just transaction frequency, it’s about creating a sense of belonging.

Traditional loyalty programs often focus on transactional rewards, but a sense of belonging can be created by rewarding customers just for staying with the brand. This insight led to the creation of our Circle of Joy loyalty program, which rewards our customers simply for staying with us, offering escalating rewards based on how long they have been with us as opposed to their spending.

We designed it to be accessible and easy to use, with subscribers earning points from the very first day with no additional conditions needed to access their rewards. To provide varied and relevant rewards for our customers’ digital lifestyles, we use OpenAPI to integrate non-telco partner rewards straight into our app.

Conclusion: Raising the Bar for Telco CX

Great customer experiences require continuous growth, both in our services and the software that enables them.

The telco industry has a bright future if we work together to provide greater customer-centric experiences. Together, we can understand customers better and develop better software and solutions.

Circles.Life’s journey has shown that focusing on both can transform how telcos operate and build loyalty. By listening to customers, embracing data-driven insights, and leveraging innovative software, we’ve created a model that other telcos can adopt to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

It’s time for the telco industry to raise the standard of customer experience. Let’s build the future of telco CX together.

Contact Circles.Life to learn how our software can help your telco thrive.