A typical customer transaction crosses 35 technology systems and only a third of that data is integrated. Employees toggling between systems or not having access to certain data leads to disconnected customer experiences. The most common scenario is subscribers having to repeat personal information when they call with a question about their service.

How can communications service providers unlock the critical insights across the organization that will improve the customer experience, no matter where or how they interact?

What does a “complete view of the customer” really mean? It includes every customer interaction and preference that relates to a company — calls, page views, campaign interactions, event attendance, buying power, tech use, and more. Basically, anything and everything that helps to better serve, identify, and predict customer needs.

Service providers can connect siloed data and siloed teams in order to achieve that 360-degree customer view by replatforming in the cloud. This requires a business support systems (BSS) layer that integrates existing digital marketing, commerce, and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms in order to:

• Consolidate the number of tools to avoid toggling between platforms
• Empower employees to deliver the right experiences at the right time by utilizing AI to anticipate the next-best actions
• Make relevant customer data easily accessible across the organization

With an agile, cloud-based solution, providers reduce the technical debt that results in rework and increased costs. That’s why research suggests 70% of communications service providers are considering public cloud deployments for their BSS transformations.

Traditionally, organizations integrate data using custom point-to-point code, but custom code is the enemy of speed and agility. It breaks easily and creates bottlenecks because there are few within the organization who can apply and update it.

An application programming interface (API) strategy helps providers build reusable integration assets that ultimately save time and money in the long run. The APIs act as building blocks, wrapping various components, such as inventory data or order status, so they are easily discovered, understood, consumed, and secured. Different teams easily access data and digital capabilities, while IT manages and secures the data at scale. This gives companies even more agility because they can connect different applications together without having to write custom APIs. In fact, 74% of IT leaders say APIs improve productivity.

But exposing the network to third-party developers requires secure API integration. Use of industry standards such as TM Forum Open APIs is critical — yet most CSPs still use homegrown, proprietary APIs, which can slow down agility and hinder future innovation in rapidly changing markets. Industry standard APIs are available through an enterprise product catalog and exposed, or sold in a consumption model, to an ecosystem of developers to explore and create apps.

An effective API management platform helps communications service providers by:

• Improving operational efficiency and enabling new market opportunities powered at web speed instead of brittle point-to-point approaches
• Unlocking data and processes from operations and BSS to create consistent customer experiences across channels
• Accelerating new product and channel development by empowering external ecosystems (for example, the network of producers, consumers, products, and services in a marketplace)

To successfully enable a lean tech stack using an API strategy, providers must bring employees together. The key is to encourage every department to share, collaborate, and deliver integrated experiences down to the most junior employees. How?

• Share goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) with peers outside your team — even those that don’t normally work together
• Explore ways to help each other by fostering cross-functional collaboration; Slack can be used as the interface that brings together different departments that would otherwise be working in silos and in different systems into one centralized location to collaborate and quickly resolve the issue
• Make data actionable by understanding what customers need, when they need it, and why

However, when it comes to meeting customer expectations, the buck doesn’t stop at the technology. Once service providers have the right infrastructure, they need to rethink how they organize, access, and make use of their data. More on that in the next section.

Take the next-best actions to make sense of your data with easy-to-use tools.

Once communications service providers have consolidated their data, they need to implement effective, easy-to-use tools to understand that data. Data visualization tools and analytics built directly into employees’ workflows can help providers do more with their existing network, more deeply understand customer behavior, and recognize changing patterns of demand.

With industry-specific, embedded analytics that are native to Salesforce, such as CRM Analytics for Communications Cloud. Service providers can help their sales and service teams make better decisions that are based on a complete customer view. This leads to:

Increased sales productivity: Intelligent analytics guides sales representatives to take the next-best actions in order to reduce the time-to-quote, shorten the sales cycle, and boost revenue

Personalized customer engagement with AI: Communications service providers can design more effective acquisition and retention strategies with the help of AI-based personalization using a particular subscriber’s usage, preferences, and even churn risk, in addition to increasing NPS scores

Stronger business impact: Providers can quickly measure and assess business performance against pre-built KPIs in an easily understood and shareable visual format, which ultimately drives automation within the business

Visualize your data

Vast stores of data on its own can’t help increase productivity, boost customer engagement, or deliver better experiences. But with intelligent analytics, service providers can automate the evaluation of huge quantities of disparate data streams quickly and deliver the results in an easy-to-interpret, actionable format. That enables them to spot trends and surface insights to sell and serve customers smarter.

Use AI to unlock next best actions

Communications service providers face the challenge of continuously delivering powerful customer experiences while managing their costs. Once they unlock their data, they need to know what to do with it within the context of the work they’re already doing. To achieve this delicate balance, intelligent, built-in AI informs decision making and removes guesswork.

AI analyzes data and makes predictions based on customer behaviors and preferences. Providers can take these insights and deliver a seamless customer experience, increase employee productivity, and reduce the cost to serve. This enables sales and service agents to answer questions like:

• What is the health of my pipeline?
• Is there an upsell opportunity in the quotes already presented to the customer?
• Which quotes need attention so I can fulfill my quota?
• What should I focus on to improve my productivity?

At the same time, service agents need to understand the following:

• What is the sentiment of the customer I’m interacting with?
• Can I anticipate the customer’s request? How can I provide answers in a timely manner?
• Is the customer at risk of walking away?
• Is a retention offer appropriate at this time?

Generative AI can also be used to personalize the experience:

• It can draft follow-up emails to the customer and account executive following a service call.
• Website chatbots can provide guided journeys for the customer based on their service inquiries.
• It can also arm agents with knowledge articles, for example, or next best actions when they’re engaging with a customer live.

Communications service providers can also identify the drivers of customer churn, evaluate call-handling metrics, and measure the performance of different call scripts and agent teams — reducing costs and increasing customer satisfaction scores. In fact, 79% of IT leaders say generative AI will help their organizations operate more efficiently, and 77% say generative AI will help serve their customers faster, according to Salesforce’s 2023 Generative AI in IT Survey.

Create a virtuous cycle of data collection

Customers show their trust in two connected ways: They give their money and their data. The best way for providers to earn more data is to analyze existing data and turn it into insights, which leads to improved customer experiences. The cycle continues as long as they deliver what customers want: experiences that feel as effortless as possible. Here are some best practices to keep in mind:

• Create a voice-of-the-customer (VoC) function: Get feedback from customers to establish a baseline and set a single improvement goal as your starting point
• Integrate insights into one narrative: Tell one story behind the numbers — experiment with listening tours, advisory boards, and focus groups to bring color and context to scorecards and trendlines
• Operationalize insight reviews: Integrate customers into strategic planning and assign an accountable owner to each metric or measurement that stems from what you heard
• Invest in intelligence and automation to drive accountability: An analysis tool or machine layered on top of your qualitative feedback is one of the most effective ways to unlock insights
• Invest in AI and automation to connect with customers: Deploy AI and automation to understand subscribers’ complete profile (network usage, churn-prediction data, and billing data) and offer personalized promotions, like a discounted mobile hotspot for example, or proactive field service to detect and fix issues.
• Inspire a customer listening movement: Motivate your team and your stakeholders to stay engaged and keep acting on customers’ needs by recognizing results and rewarding teams that become listening champions
• Close the loop: Listening means you need to communicate and react. Customers expect to hear back from you on what you are doing, what you’re not able to do, and what else you need from them for a successful partnership

Respond to customer needs better and faster than your competitors.

Let’s say a provider successfully creates a thriving culture of data and unlocks valuable customer data with a lean tech stack and the right platform. Now what? It’s time to stay one step ahead of customers and their evolving behaviors and needs.

Get predictive and prescriptive

Predictive intelligence enables users to mine through large volumes of data to find valuable relationships between causes and consequences and make educated predictions based on those relationships. Tools like CRM Analytics for Communications Cloud help service providers use their data to discover correlations and prescribe actions that drive desired outcomes. And because CRM Analytics for Communications Cloud is built on Salesforce’s Communications Cloud, it solves for the unique needs of communications service providers with an industry-specific data model. This includes the ability to:

• Predict which sales leads and opportunities will convert and which articles and replies will help resolve service cases
• Use historical browsing and purchase data to predict which channels, content, products, and messaging your customers will respond to
• Create custom models to predict likelihood to convert, delayed payments, lifetime value, and more
• Get an intelligent snapshot of subscriber sentiment to predict likelihood to churn

Prescriptive actions are generated as a result of predictive intelligence. They are the recommended next steps for providers looking to take action with their data and the key to creating proactive, personalized customer experiences.

Empower sales to improve conversions

With AI embedded into data visualization tools, the sales team can identify, segment, and target the right high-scoring leads quickly. For example, a sales associate can use AI to identify prepaid customers who are good candidates to convert to contract customers, then connect with them on their preferred channels to deliver an appropriate offer.

Improve the performance of launched products and services

Sales, marketing, and product teams can use customizable dashboards to analyze product uptake and the customer’s experience score to adjust campaigns, bundling, and price changes. They can also gauge sentiment with an intelligent snapshot of customer interactions and KPIs and drill deeper into subscriber metrics that predict the likelihood of churn, which arms reps with AI-driven recommendations to boost retention.

Empower your team to deliver better customer service

These tools help the service team by reducing repeat dispatches, shortening implementation timelines, cutting down on order fallout, and helping to drive retention and revenue. For example, AI can predict each customer’s suitability for self-install and optimize shipment delivery, as well as analyze past order fulfillment to identify potential issues in the future. They can also surface key metrics that predict likelihood to churn and then recommend the most relevant products and offers to improve retention and build loyalty.

Stay one step ahead of your customers

The problem isn’t that communications service providers don’t have enough data. It’s that they must figure out how to connect the vast silos of data they already have. When that happens, providers can uncover critical insights that drive business forward.