A panel including Troy Cross, Vice President of Sales, Ozmo, Daniel Barsoum, CEO, Qué Tal Mobile, Adam Wolf, President, National Wireless Independent Dealer Association, and moderated by Alexander Tsao, MVNO Expert came together to discuss the importance of customer service.
The panel explored a topic which is arguably overlooked or under-valued by many businesses, not just in the MVNO space but in all sectors. Customer service and customer experience are critical for minimising your churn and achieving customer loyalty. With the trends and challenges affecting the MVNO market right now, that has never been a higher priority.
How should a modern MVNO approach customer service and customer experience today?
The panel highlighted three key points for effective customer service in the current market:
1. Customer service should be a top priority
Since MVNOs have so much to think about, and so many costs to manage, in many cases customer support is usually the last thing they think about.
However, the panel argued this should be the first thing you think about. With so many affordable options in the market today, if you don’t provide excellent service and an excellent experience to your customers, you’ll lose them. It’s as simple as that.
“You need to know who your customers are, what they want, and give it to them in the exact way they want it.”
One example raised by the speakers is that while everything is becoming increasingly digital, there are many segments of the market who still prefer and value in-person, in-store experiences, analog processes, human-to-human interaction, and so on.
If your customer base is a demographic who doesn’t want digital-first service, and you transform all your customer service to digital simply because everyone else is doing it, you will lose those customers eventually.
2. Great customer service will require some investment
There’s a lot of noise in the market right now about how AI-powered tools can save MVNOs money and allow you to have excellent automated customer service for very low costs.
The panel warned against trusting this blindly and expecting great customer service to come cheap.
One speaker said, “I don’t want to sugar-coat this and say you can do it all for free. It’s going to take some investment. New technology can now allow you to do it for much lower costs than before, but you still need to invest in getting it right.”
Another important point on that was to not wait too long to invest. MVNOs that neglect customer service and support risk harming their brand and losing the trust of the target audience.
3. Your brand lives and dies on customer experience
As touched on in the previous line, your brand’s survival depends on your customers having a great experience. Customer experience shapes the perception of your brand just as much as your logo and your messaging.
If you prioritise excellent customer service, your business will likely succeed. If you don’t, it’s at a higher risk of failure.
More importantly, though, a customer-centric brand is an excellent way to stand out from your competitors and differentiate.
If you can ingrain customer centricity into your company culture, then you’re setting yourself up for success.
Unified knowledge base, systems, and tools are essential for great customer service
Perhaps the first step on the journey to excellent customer service is unification of all your business’s knowledge base, information, data, and systems.
This allows all your customer service and support reps, and everyone else in your business, to be completely aligned and up-to-date on what’s happening with the business.
For a single customer interacting with your business, whether visiting the website, talking to a chat-bot, coming into a store, or calling the sales department, that customer should receive the exact same answer to their question in all those places.
Having a unified knowledge base also allows customer service reps to provide consistency and accuracy to each individual customer in each interaction, which is fundamental to a positive customer experience.
The goal here is simplicity, not complexity.
Unifying all your systems, tools, and information should make it as simple as possible for the entire company to support customers.
Using customer service to grow your business
Once you have a unified, consistent customer support system in place, you can then begin to look at opportunities to use customer service to grow your business.
One speaker recommended empowering customer service teams to keep customers engaged after their initial query is resolved, in case there are ways to upsell.
When customer service reps are given up-to-date data about their customers while interacting with them, it may be possible to recognise opportunities to offer additional products or services based on that customer’s needs. This can unlock more business growth by using the conversations your customers are starting to strengthen your relationships.
What role is AI playing in MVNO customer service?
While AI-powered tools undeniably offer efficiencies and advantages in customer service, the panelists reiterated that prioritising the preferences of your specific customers should still always be the priority.
“Leverage these tools in the right places for the right reasons,” said one speaker. “Again, that should be driven by what your customers actually want, giving them the best possible experience.”
It’s not wise to automate processes and introduce new technologies for the sake of it, or only to cut costs. Use AI tools for use cases that actually add value to your customers, such as removing friction in processes like onboarding.
One speaker agreed, adding, “Don’t use AI for customer deflection.”
Another valuable use case for AI in customer service is in consolidating and unifying knowledge and information, as discussed earlier. Using intelligent automation to ensure all your customer service reps, and wider teams, are giving all customers the exact same answers consistently will help improve your customer retention.
Avoiding pitfalls with AI in customer service
The panel also highlighted some common pitfalls which MVNOs must try to avoid falling into regarding AI implementation in customer service.
AI is not yet reliable on its own
While AI is highly effective in certain use cases and processes, one speaker warned against trusting AI in customer-facing situations without human-in-the-loop supervision.
“I think AI can be reliable in terms of automation,” said one speaker. “And it can be good as a discovery tool, but it can’t be relied on for trusted answers yet. It can be relied on for good answers, but I don’t think “good” is the right bar you should be striving for with customer service.”
“Be careful about using AI to be the answer engine itself.”
AI is not a differentiator
The panel also highlighted that MVNOs should not be viewing AI as something that can be used as a differentiator. AI is quickly becoming a commodity tool. So while AI can absolutely help improve customer service, it’s not a differentiator.
Your customer centricity, your culture, your connection with your target audience, and your brand are differentiators, but an AI-powered product is not. AI is a tool that can help you enhance or express a differentiation that your MVNO should already have.
What are the most overlooked opportunities for MVNOs to build deeper loyalty and trust?
The speakers suggested, for MVNOs using indirect distribution, that a priority should be to “take care of your dealers.”
Dealers are critical to the service and experience your customers receive, and therefore they’re critical to the success of your business.
Ensure your dealers are empowered with the knowledge, tools, and support to succeed. That includes driving customers into stores. It also includes compensating dealers fairly.
“Find innovative ways to compensate dealers to ensure they don’t need to switch their customers over to other providers,” advised one speaker.
Another important piece of advice given by the panel was to ensure your dealers are kept fully up-to-date on everything that’s happening with your business.
Giving a very straightforward example, one speaker said, “If you’re changing something on the first day of January, tell your dealers on the 29th of December, not the second or third of January.”
Quick-fire tips for excellent customer service and experience
Giving a final series of quick-fire tips for excellent customer service, the speakers added:
- The best customer support is proactive, not reactive, so try to prevent the need for the customer to contact you in the first place.
- You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to be better than your competitors. Use metrics and data to measure and optimise this.
- Value the customer as part of your company culture. Set clear expectations with your team about what kind of company you want to be, and what kind of service you want to provide.
Key take-aways and guidance for MVNOs
Customer service is crucial for minimising churn and maximising customer retention. If you’re an MVNO looking to gain more trust, loyalty, and longevity from your customers, you should:
- Prioritise and invest in customer service as a core part of your culture
- Be proactive, not reactive with customer service
- Unify your knowledge base, information, and systems to improve consistency
- Remain customer-centric even when introducing new technologies
- Do not view AI as a differentiator
- Use customer service and support to upsell when possible
- Take good care of your dealers and empower them to succeed.
