Telecom Reseller / Technology Reseller News

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

“We've been doing AI since before it was a household name, but most recently with the semantic search capability,” says Scott Kendrick, who's the Senior Vice President of Strategy and Alliances at CallMiner. “We are allowing our users to get insight more easily and readily with our system. Leveraging models to allow for somewhat of a natural language interface to query context, you know, ask for interactions that may have had a certain characteristic and getting responses from those.”

“Sure. CallMiner is a conversation intelligence platform. What we do is analyze interactions that happen between companies and their customers. And those can be interactions with humans or humans and bots, or even one-sided pieces of feedback, so a review or possibly a response within the survey platform. We analyze all that information and provide performance improvement direction for contact centers and their agents, but also general business intelligence insights in terms of other ways that they can improve their business.”

In this special EC24 Snom at the Show TR Podcast, we also learn about the CallMiner channel program, and more details on how resellers gain with CallMiner.

Visit www.callminer.com

“It's interesting that the trifecta, the UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS have all become relevant to enterprises,” says Sanjay Srinivasan, Chief Architect, GM, SVP, Business Services, Vonage. Sanjay will be speaking at the Cloud Connections 2024 event in April: Seizing the CPaaS advantage.

“From what I'm observing, there's a distinct change in the buyer behavior that I've seen in the past year, starting maybe a year and a half ago, but then now it's firmly rooted in the past enterprises, the CPaaS buyer, which rarely there was one because that world was new to them, the UCaaS buyer and the CCaaS buyer were all different, different departments, different decisions, different budgets, et cetera. But in the last year and a half, certainly we can see that UCaaS and CCaaS buying is coming together. And this is a strong trend.”

In this short podcast we catch a glimpse of how CPaaS is moving beyond the developers and onto the big stage of major enterprise deployment. CPaaS is an opportunity.

Visit www.vonage.com

“We're going to be featuring headset telemetry,” says Vern Fernandez who is the Senior Manager for Strategic Alliances at Jabra. Most people don't know that you can get that but if you're trying to find needles in the haystack or understand call quality monitoring this is something that you should have you know you had it when you had phones and you should have it from the headset.”

We also will be seeing products that monitor sentiment. Humans don’t just communicate with words. The way those words are delivered makes all the difference. An agent might be on script, a customer’s words might be ‘correct’. But sentiment might indicate a very different situation. AI can be used to watch, or literally hear, tone.

Catch a glimpse of Jabra’s take on what’s next at Cloud Connections 2024.

Mutare will be at Cloud Connections 2024, April 17th-19th, 2024, The Vinoy, St. Petersburg, Florida

Aaron Klein of Mutare, Inc. is talking about Voice Traffic Filter (VTF). The Voice Traffic Filter acts as a firewall for the voice channel, eliminating nuisance and nefarious calls at the beginning of the contact center’s call flow. Utilizing proprietary voice data analysis capabilities built into five distinct layers of filtering technologies, VTF detects and removes all forms of spam, scam, spoofed, and otherwise unwanted calls before they enter the Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system... and you can see a demo of this at the upcoming Cloud Connections 2024.

See it all at Cloud Connections 2024 https://lnkd.in/gAfMYDgV

Visit mutare.com

Cristina Betanzo of GXC tells us about new opportunities with their new tiered partner program in this short podcast from Channel Partners. Learn about the incentives. Learn about the service. In big open spaces, for industries with a big physical footprint, GXC delivers seamless wireless private networks.

Partners advance through the tiers – Authorized, Silver, Gold, and Platinum – leverage escalating discounts on our turnkey solutions, mirroring your dedication and achievements. Meanwhile the partners get comprehensive marketing support, where the partners advance their own brand, and gain footing in the key mobility market.

“AI technologies are definitely maturing, and more and more communications providers and technology developers are using AI to enhance their solutions,” says Elka Popova

VP and Senior Fellow for Connected Work Research, at Frost and Sullivan. “I think at the moment most of the AI-powered innovation that we're seeing is in contact center, more specifically contact center as a service, and to some extent in cloud meetings. There is, however, huge potential to continue to enhance voice communications, analytics tools, and other parts of kind of the broader business communication space using AI technologies. And I think the onus is on the vendor community to figure out which AI-powered features and capabilities need to be table stakes and provided to customers free of charge and just kind of used to create customer value but not necessarily create revenues.”

Popova will be one of the featured panel members on a session labelled: Forecasting the Cloudscape: Navigating Present Realities and Future Horizons of Communications, UCaaS, CCaaS, CPaaS, Security: Crafting the Ultimate Collaboration Suite for Revenue Growth. Popova’s work focusses on UCaaS, Collaboration and the Future of Work. She has spoken and participated in CCA events and is widely respected expert on these markets and trends.

“And then there will be other features and capabilities that will have to be offered at a premium. And once the vendors monetize these capabilities, I think this will kind of elevate the industry to a different level.”

Visit frost.com

Visit CloudCommunications.com

Register for show at https://www.cloudcommunications.com/events/cloud-connections-2024

“We really want to highlight our Vision 360 platform,” says Max Edwards, Sales Engineer of Kakapo Systems. “We've had a lot of interest. We've been doing a lot of demos for prospective customers. We have a lot of people on our lab and evaluation platform, so we want to keep getting the word out, keep talking about the benefits and how we can replace and improve upon ECCR and DBS in many ways with our Vision 360 product.” Kakapo Systems is a sponsor of Cloud Connections 2024 and will be featuring these products at the conference.

“We do have a small to medium-sized business contact center that sits right on top of your BroadSoft ACD deployment using the BroadSoft as the voice channel with the addition of web chats, emails, SMS queues, as well as web callbacks and Twitter or X, however you prefer to call it.”

Kakapo Systems has developed flagship Unity applications for BroadSoft. These modular software applications, all able to work collectively with full omnichannel capability in the consolidated Unity Contact Center product.

Unity for Teams greatly enhances the overall solution by adding BroadSoft directories and overlay services, such as call center, which can all be managed from within Microsoft Teams. Unity for Teams options include Desktop, for UC users, as well as Agent and Supervisor to embed the BroadSoft ACD functionality within Microsoft Teams.

Visit https://www.kakaposystems.com/

UCaaS and CCaaS coming together with Teams and in the age of Hybrid, Forecasting the Cloudscape

“I'll be on a panel with a few other analysts, and we're basically going to be talking about trends and what our crystal balls are showing us, and all about cloud communications and things that the service providers are interested in,” says Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion. Blair will be one of the featured panelists in special session forecasting the cloudscape.

“I'm sure we're going to be talking about the growing role of contact center and CCaaS and customer experience. And most UC vendors now are also offering contact center capabilities... and along those lines, I expect we'll be talking about the integration of UCaaS and CCaaS and how they're coming together and how organizations are using these integrated solutions.” Pleasant adds that Microsoft Teams and the changing world of hybrid work will also be covered in the session.

“And I have a feeling we might talk about AI a little bit,” adds Blair.

In thinking about the upcoming event, Blair had been looking at how service providers will bring AI into their solution portfolios. “How do I get them on the road to AI?”

“… Because it's not just a one and done thing.”

Visit https://www.commfusion.com/

Brian Beutler of Alianza, Inc. says: "So transitioning legacy communications networks to cloud seems to be increasing in priority and urgency, and we're excited to talk about it in more detail. I think over the course of the last year, even the course of the last six months, just feels like the winds have changed. And service providers, large and small, that used to be questioning maybe what their communications platform strategies are now all looking to the cloud. It's becoming the de facto solution for… we call it the landing zone."

Learn more about cloud as the landing zone... Brian is speaking at Cloud Connections 2024.

See it all at hashtag#CloudConnections2024

Don't miss it https://lnkd.in/gAfMYDgV