Telecom industry needs to up its game
One of the biggest issues many people have with the government is that it doesn’t listen to what the people are saying. It appears telecom has the same problem. The results of a recent survey, conducted by Procera Networks, show that telecom has a customer service problem.
Procera Networks surveyed more than 540 consumers from 62 countries about their mobile subscriber experience. The results show that telecom has a long way to go to satisfy the needs of its customers.
The first part of this infographic shows the telecom industry’s place among other industries when it comes to customer service. Respondents were asked which industries have the worst customer service, and the telecom industry ranked only slightly better than the government, and 20 percentage points higher than the health care industry when it comes to customer dissatisfaction.
It appears that video quality and connectivity are at the heart of the industry’s issues. The study found a combined 90% of customers rated their worst experiences as falling into the poor video quality and basic connectivity/coverage categories.
But customers may need to shoulder a small portion of the blame. The survey found, despite the combination of high consumer expectations and poor experiences with mobile coverage and video quality, a combined 85% of them never, or rarely, call customer service.
Some other key highlights of the survey that may not be so surprising are:
- 80% of respondents say it’s critical to have high-speed coverage, however, 60% feel they don’t have continuous high-speed coverage;
- 75% stream video on mobile devices several times per week with 80% expecting that it will increase in the future and 70% rating it very important to have good-quality video streaming; and
- 90% experience video quality problems every day.
These trends show that the industry has a long way to go to meet customers data and video needs.
So what can MNOs and others in the telco industry do to fix the problems?
Procera points to data analytics as a way to identify and meet their customers’ greatest needs. It said, “Whether that means setting policies that can more effectively manage the subscriber experience, enabling first call problem resolution, allowing engineers to see and fix network problems before subscribers even notice or report an issue, providing key info for executives to better plan their capex spend, or marketing new revenue generating services that consumers want.”
Of those surveyed, 30% were from the U.S., 35% from Europe and 35% from the rest of the world.
