GenAI holds immense promise for customer engagement in the telecom industry. Find out more about how GenAI can enhance revenue streams and customer loyalty, and the considerations for deployment.
Enhancing telco revenue streams and customer loyalty with GenAi
In an increasingly commoditized market, providers are seeking new revenue opportunities by offering differentiated services to enhance customer experience. With GenAI, telcos now have more flexibility to go beyond traditional offerings and drive innovation and excellence through hyper-personalization.
Chatbot enhancements currently constitute the most common GenAI use cases in telcos. Applications that generate business value, such as improving sales, churn modelling and marketing effectiveness, are also gaining ground. A report by Altman Solon, sponsored by AWS, reports that Communication Service Providers (CSPs) with a higher degree of data capability are pursuing revenue-generating use cases such as personalization and new product feature generation. 64% of CSPs surveyed agreed that many of the GenAI use cases being considered were novel applications.
Unlocking new value streams
Results from GenAI pilots by telcos are encouraging. A McKinsey study reports that a Latin American telco expects costs to fall by 15-20 percent with GenAI enhancements in chatbots and agent support. By using Gen AI’s summarization capability for voice and written customer interactions, the telco expects to reduce associated costs by up to 80 percent.
Telcos are building capabilities around conversational AI at the contact center to capture the customers' voice and intent. Feeding this instance further into GenAI tools will not just transcribe voice into text but also analyze it for context and sentiment. The contact center agent is equipped with a powerful knowledge base built upon a Large Language Model (LLM), which enables quicker resolution of customer inquiries.
GenAI can detect the perfect moments to interact with a customer. For instance, if the customer is using more than their monthly plan, GenAI can suggest an upgrade. Additionally, using data from voice interactions, GenAI can assist the agent in guiding the customer through the upgrade process.
Hyper-personalization based on deep customer insights is driving sales and marketing effectiveness, opening opportunities for higher revenue generation. GenAI models continuously analyze customer data, enabling the creation of personalized messages that adapt to the unique characteristics of each microsegment. A McKinsey study highlights that a European telco is achieving a conversion rate of more than 10% by generating new sales leads from customer interactions.
With the vast amount of customer data, providers can now offer personalized ‘next-best actions’ and ‘next-best offers’ to drive customer engagement and satisfaction.
Deployment considerations for GenAI
GenAI holds immense promise for customer engagement in the telecom industry. However, success will hinge on responsible data management, adherence to evolving regulations, and a strategic adoption approach. While data quality will be paramount for a trustworthy output, addressing the complexities of privacy laws and ethical AI will ensure customer confidence. An equally important factor will be agility—how an organization finds use cases that offer optimal benefits, deploys them quickly for an early-mover advantage, and continues to adapt as new frontiers open up such as text to video conversion which is slated to be the next big thing.