Now more than ever, we live in a world where the internet is an essential part of our everyday lives. Whether for work, school, or entertainment, people depend on having access to reliable internet connectivity wherever they are. When problems occur and that connection is interrupted, users feel immediate pain. Too often, they also struggle to find an avenue to connect with their service provider for immediate help. Affected users frequently turn to social media platforms in the hope of eliciting a response from the provider or simply to see if they're alone in their frustration. Unfortunately, these platforms can add to frustrations as reliable information on problem status is elusive, and dissatisfactions are amplified.
Once outages occur, service providers have a small window of opportunity to get their communication right. When Facebook became unavailable globally due to a DNS error last October, Downdetector received over 10.6 million user reports — the largest outage we've ever seen on the platform. Speculation immediately swirled. To their credit, Facebook quickly published a thorough explanation of how a misconfigured update in their back-end led to the outage. In so doing, they helped put millions of people at ease and regained the confidence of their user base.
While Facebook got communication efforts right in this instance, replicating this kind of quick turnaround response isn't easy. Today's online services rely on increasingly complex architectures with many interdependencies. Opaque relationships between applications, interconnected networks, and shared cloud platforms understandably leave consumers scratching their heads and struggling to understand who is responsible when things go sideways.
The usual suspect
Telecoms network operators are particularly vulnerable to being on the receiving end of customer ire when an application or service delivered across their network stops working. When the application acts up, users may not have enough context to understand the root cause of the issue they’re experiencing - whether that’s a network or application problem.
Operators may feel unfairly treated in these scenarios, especially given their industry's famously low levels of customer satisfaction. According to Customer Gauge's latest NPS Benchmarks Report, the industry has an average Net Promoter Score of 31—the lowest of the industries it tracks.
Operators all over the globe are making meaningful changes to turn this trend around. Super-responsive 5G networks are rolling out at speed to deliver smoother mobile experiences to a rapidly growing number of customers with 5G-ready devices. Despite this hard work to expand the reach and performance of networks, telcos that neglect customer-facing operations and fail to embrace their role in delivering connected experiences to the end user still risk dealing with public criticism when problems occur.
So, what can operators do to improve customer satisfaction during network and application outages?
Opening the feedback loop
Most telcos today have an online method for customers to seek help or to lodge a complaint, such as a chatbot or text-based customer care team. While customers tend to like these simple online interactions for everyday needs, a chatbot is only as valuable as the data that powers it, and a support agent needs timely and accurate information to satisfy the customer.
In practice, this means arming teams with real time data but also evolving the customer care relationship. Rather than waiting for customers to engage via support channels or social media, operators can empower customers with self-serve options that go beyond a chatbot to check their network status, report issues, and opt-in for relevant updates specific to their location. These capabilities can be integrated into the operator's own customer care apps, giving users the mobile-first experience to which they've become accustomed.
Of course, it is one thing to help telcos better communicate the status of their own network, but what about when a connected application or service experiences issues and operators are left receiving complaints? By leveraging crowdsourced data based on first-hand reports, operators can incorporate real-time insights about the status of internet-based services and apps that their users care about directly into their dashboards and customer care tools. In doing so, operators supply support agents and customers with a valuable understanding of what isn't working and why. When customers are given a constructive avenue to share their experience and receive proactive and quick correspondence on issues, operators receive fewer complaints and experience high levels of customer satisfaction as a result.
Finding an authoritative voice
Digital transformation is a long, ongoing journey. For it to be a success, it must encompass the evolution of customer care operations. Although solutions to modernize these operations aren't quick and easy fixes, seeing them through will give operators a crucial advantage in an increasingly competitive market. American economist Paul Romer famously said, "a crisis is a terrible thing to waste." By embracing the opportunity presented by the crisis of an impactful outage, operators have a chance to recast the frustration of their user base into increased trust and ultimately improved customer loyalty. This begins with proactive communication regarding potential issues and informing their support teams as to the state of their network and problems with internet-connected services before complaints begin to come in, rather than playing catch-up with outages or deflecting blame.
It is possible to surprise and delight customers with excellent customer service. In an increasingly interconnected world, this is only possible with the right information.
