CX Networks 2022: Patience, Trust and Pride

As we come to the end of the year, we want to reflect on what we have accomplished and where we can do better. For Telia Carrier, Customer Experience (CX) is about empowering our people to always do better. The heart of making CX a success is the sense of ownership that everyone in our company feels, which leads to the freedom and autonomy to do what needs to be done to help customers. This empowers our team to act on their own to be problem solvers.

We also want to look forward to the year to come and anticipate our customer needs. For CX and industry trends, this year has seen regions of the world recover from the pandemic while other parts still struggle. Here are some trends we see that will continue in 2022.

#1 Patience Runs Thin – Customer Sensitivity for Faults is Low

Customer sensitivity for disturbances in service has always been low. Still, we see that in times of crisis and post-pandemic in particular when it comes to network outages patience runs exceptionally thin. While customers would always be concerned if there was an outage, today, we see that customers are concerned with all categories of faults. For example, lower category or lower impact faults do concern customers more today than they did 18 months ago.

Customers who need reliable network access will not hesitate to rank a provider negatively if the service is down. They are also looking for faster support with incidents, network outages, issue escalations and customer requests.

From simple requests and questions about the customer portal to other more complex operational issues, our team must prioritize working through these issues as quickly and humanely as possible.

At Telia Carrier, we collaborate very effectively throughout the organization and work closely with the Service Delivery and other units within Operations to resolve problems and identify patterns. For example, this may be where certain network conditions might be creating an issue on multiple occasions.

#2 Better Transparency from Carrier to Customer is Gaining Momentum

Customers are more sensitive and welcome more information, and they are no longer satisfied with general statements about the network being down – they want granular details. Many of our clients have extremely sensitive applications that are affected by every network event. Client-side monitoring is helping them understand those events and the relationship with the applications in more detail and quickly.

We must provide good transparency and communication, from recurrent updates during a fault, to the reason for an outage, to how we address the root cause and prevent faults from happening in the future. One of our current focus areas is a complete mind shift within the team on how we communicate with customers during fault resolution process.

#3 Transparency is a Continuous Conversation

There is a balance between how much information is shared with customers to provide enough insight without inundating them with information. Today we see a shift in that balance from being on the safe side to saying more to provide customers with more information. However, we must dare enough to say we have failed, recognize our weaknesses and be forward-thinking about preventing this from happening again.

How we communicate with customers is becoming more important. We must be transparent, always sticking to the facts and what is happening with plenty of detail.

For example, a fault that happened recently on our network, which attracted some media attention. We responded quickly on social media about the outage and provided additional insight into the cause. As a result, we received positive comments from those who asked questions about the outage. As opposed to ignoring the issue, we were proactive and transparent. It is not common for carriers to respond like this in our industry, and we believe this needs to change.

Source: https://twitter.com/TeliaCarrier/status/1446207745695305729

Source: https://twitter.com/g_bonfiglio/status/1446212204873846792?s=20

Transparency Can Build Trust

We have seen similar reactions in customer meetings, where examples of faults were presented in a transparent and constructive way. Customers appreciate the level of detail provided in a fault, the care taken to provide a description, what happened and how it was dealt with. Reaction time, response time and coming out ahead, can make the difference.

Telia Carrier simplifies connectivity for customers in more than 120 countries. Besides operating one of the world’s greatest networks, we believe that the difference between other providers and us lies in the way we make connectivity easier for our customers.

We Are Proud of What We Do

No day on network CX services is the same. We are extremely proud that Telia Carrier recently won a Bronze Stevie Award for Customer Service Department of the Year in 2021. We were also recently recognized as a finalist for the World Communication Awards (WCA) for Best Customer Experience.

This recognition represents the very best of the global telecom industry and rigorous scrutiny. We understand that today’s customers have more choice than ever before and choosing a provider that embraces the value of its customers is an increasingly important factor in the selection process. As we look ahead into planning for next year what is certain is that Telia Carrier will continue to focus on people-defined networking, putting the customer first.

Learn more about CX at Telia Carrier.

Anna Demchenko, 
Director of Customer Services