Three Must-Haves to Improve Your Telecom Retail Customer Experience

By Stacy Hamer, Chief Operating Officer, iQmetrix

In challenging market conditions, telecom retail businesses that want to remain competitive will need to retain the loyalty of the customers that they already have. This means keeping up with rapidly evolving consumer expectations for customer service. This has become increasingly true as demanding younger consumers—such as Gen Alpha, who were practically born with phones in their hands—start to come on stream over the next decade.

So, how can telecom retailers meet customer expectations and provide great purchasing experiences? Here are the trends to stay on top of—or get left behind.

1. Fully understanding the customer and personalizing their experience is more crucial than ever

With the typical buyer’s journey now spanning multiple channels, it’s no longer enough to have a partial view of your customers. You could be missing crucial information that might help you land a sale or keep that customer loyal. But how do you get on top of customer insights to create a fully personalized customer experience that today’s—and future—customers expect?

At a panel event at CES 2024 in Las Vegas, Brian Higgins, Verizon’s Chief Customer Experience Officer, discussed the concept of the “segment of one” — meaning that each individual customer is their own consumer segment with very specific personal wants and needs. His perspective is that with new AI technology coming on stream, true customer personalization can finally be achieved.

“We’ve previously had offers that go out to hundreds of thousands of people, and that’s been fine, but where we are moving to is the segment of one,” Higgins said. “As a retailer, you know about this customer through data and purchasing behavior, and you’re going to offer them promotions that are relevant to them. That’s happening now, but customers don’t realize that’s all AI in the background.”

Retailers need technology and systems that offer a 360-degree view of their customers—and that includes processes that save time in other areas to create space for engaging with customers and listening to their needs, and creating their personalized package accordingly.

Businesses that truly understand their customers’ needs will have a major advantage — Gartner has projected that this year, these retailers will outperform competitors’ CX metrics by 20%.

2. Efficient processes are mandatory, and inefficiency will not be tolerated

Today’s consumers are loyal to experiences, not brands, and will jump ship if they think they can get a better experience somewhere else. The evidence is there in the research:

• 94% of consumers are frustrated by disjointed experiences across a brand
• 54% of consumers will stop using a brand after just one bad experience

The top indicator of a bad experience? Wasted time.

• 86% of consumers have left a store because of frustration about slow lines
• 74% of consumerswill go to a competitor’s store if they feel like the lines are shorter there
• 73% of customerswill leave without making a purchase if they have to wait more than five minutes

Optimizing store tools and processes is no longer optional. Retail operators need to do what it takes to implement systems that improve transaction times and reduce frustrations, such as needing to enter the same information multiple times.

The same applies to omnichannel retail experiences. If your customer is buying online and picking up in store, for example, you need technology and systems in place that create a seamless, frictionless journey with a consistent experience across all touchpoints. This will make the customer feel as nurtured as if they were in the store talking to an attentive sales associate—while giving them the now-expected convenience of shopping online or starting their purchasing journey on social media, or at a pop-up event, or anywhere else.

3. Employee experience is important, too, and affects the customer experience

Employee turnover rates of 50% or more have been the reality in retail for years. The added stresses of the pandemic only served to increase retail employee churn to an average of 60%, as many retail employees are attempting to leave the sector entirely. Research shows that employees ​“dissatisfied with their work technology […] are more than twice as likely as those who are satisfied to say they feel burned out at work, and half as likely to say they’re generally happy with their work.”

Improving employee experience isn’t just about ensuring that stores have adequate staff to reduce long wait times. Retail research data shows that investing in better employee experience directly improves the customer experience and satisfaction.

Retail operations with highly engaged teams outperform less-engaged competitors with:

• 5% higher rates of customer satisfaction
• 10% higher likelihood of customer recommendation
• 8% higher sales
• 18% lower employee turnover

A key part of improving employee experience in wireless retail is ensuring that employees have the technology and tools that empower them to provide the best customer experience possible, without extra obstacles to seamless customer interactions.

This is another area where AI has the potential to be extremely helpful as a practical application. Verizon’s Brian Higgins explained at CES, “When the wireless store customer or even the associate don’t realize that AI is running in the background, that’s when it is most helpful. If the store associates’ lives are easier, then the customers’ lives are easier.”

Making investments to improve employee engagement and remove roadblocks to providing excellent customer service can go a long way toward giving your business the competitive advantage it needs to stay ahead in what could be another turbulent year.

About iQmetrix

iQmetrix is the only provider of Interconnected Commerce software solutions for telecom retail. Interconnected Commerce is a complete set of software and technologies that are modular, flexible, and have telecom-specific capabilities, enabling telecom retailers to provide an uplifting experience for their customers. We empower telecom retailers to transact, activate, and fulfill products, as well as operate their business, and unify the online and in-store experiences. We interconnect the entire industry, bridging carriers, retailers, manufacturers, and a huge ecosystem of vendors and external system integrations.

For 25 years, we’ve been passionate about helping the leading brands in telecom to grow by providing best-in-class software, services, and expertise that enables them to adapt and thrive. Our solutions powered $17BN in sales last year, handling nearly 60 million invoices and more than 28 million activations, and are used by more than 370,000 telecom retail professionals across almost 1,000 clients. iQmetrix is a privately held software-as-a-service (SaaS) company with employees in Canada, the U.S., India, and Europe.

For more information, please visit www.iqmetrix.com