Just back from a very interesting Total Telecoms 2023 conference at the RAI, Amsterdam, the first time that they’ve held it outside London I believe, and there were some interesting insights to share.
Consumer strategy: the world has changed, as have your customers
Esther Bolster, Director Consumer Strategy at Liberty Global said that consumers have had a tough time with Covid and the cost of living crisis and as a result are becoming very vocal about what they don’t like and are quicker to cancel contracts. It was important to understand their needs and listen to them.
Nash’at Al-Riyami (MBA), Department Head of Roaming Loyalty and Retention at Ooredoo Oman, stressed the power of Word of Mouth and that customer reviews were very important. The key to success was having happy customers.
Martin Opdam of KPN, Manager Strategy to Execution Digital Service, said that customers only contact you when something’s gone wrong. You need to understand what they’re doing when they don’t contact you. A telecom needs to be relevant to consumers.
Attila Civelek, CMO of Salt Mobile, said connectivity was becoming a commodity and that it was ever harder to differentiate. Telecoms were caught between price pressures and increasing consumer expectations.
Asked about what customers expected from digitalisation, Esther said more personalization, but that done badly, like with a bad chat bot experience, it can backfire.
Asked about last year’s buzzwords: AR, VR and the metaverse and if they’re still relevant. Martin said KPN launched its first store on the metaverse – it wasn’t a sales channel yet but was more about learning. As big tech is pumping billions into this, you can’t stand aside.
Nash’at said the situation is different in each territory. In Oman the entry of Vodafone as a digital only player threatened to disrupt the market, but the market is not very digital yet and focused on stores. She said Vodafone only captured 7% of the market and has had to focus on opening stores.
What about AI?
Attila said because Salt was small it couldn’t do everything but AI was something that did drive sales. They use AI to create personalized playlists for customers on Spotify of all the No 1 songs on each birthday throughout their life and send it with a personalized birthday email.
Martin said while a lot of tech doesn’t generate more sales, AI does. They use AI to help customers solve problems, like how to install a router.
Attila said that a lot of data gets fed to AI like data from churn surveys etc they get insights from that.
Esther said that customers are increasingly concerned about AI and want to know if they’re talking to a human. She thought it was good that Meta made advertisers declare when an article was generated by AI.
The moderator asked what was being customer centric?
Nash’at said it starts with being aware of the goal of customer centricity and having KPIs based on customer satisfaction. That the company needed to think as a whole about customers and often the goals of individual departments could be contrary to the interest of customers. For example, tech teams just want to deliver as quick as possible. So it was important to have company wide KPIs not just departmental ones.
Attila said that customer centricity needed to be driven from the top. All the staff must talk about customer centricity and it’s important from the board down to go into stores and talk to customers.
All agreed that AI would be the buzzword next year.
Data driven 5G: The Power of Network Analytics
Thomas Hodi, Product Manager at A1 talked about the huge growth in demand for data from customers. Customers’ main concerns were speed and security.
He explained how A1 derives valuable data from the network and shares this with customers to find solutions to problems.
In-home connectivity: new innovations that improve services for your residential customers
Pedro Caldeira dos Santos, Head of Broadband Products and Services from from Deutsche Telecom said he runs fibre for DT and 9 net cos
Maarten Egmond from Genexis was participating on behalf of the FTTH council – he’s part of the in-home broadband excellence committee. He said to get the broadband experience into the home needs good WiFi, half of people who have broadband don’t get the experience they should due to Wi-Fi limitations.
Steffen Brenninkmeijer VP Residential at KPN said that KPN had just launched 4GB consumer broadband – they need to explain to customers what they need to have in their homes to get that speed so there’s not a gap between marketing and delivery
Simon Hunt, Sky’s Head of Consumer Broadband – called himself grand master of broadband
The Moderator asked what’s the difference between 1GB and 4GB?
Simon says there are a million customers in UK who could have fiber before Xmas but are still on copper
Having good WiFi is the main barrier to getting good broadband in the home
Maarten 99% of people don’t need more than 1GB but WiFi is the issue
WiFi doesn’t just work by itself and to fix WiFi you need access to data to find the problems
Simon talked about the importance of controllability of WiFi like being able to turn it off for kids at 10pm
Steffen said there’s a tech delivery issue linked to WiFi as more people use it all around the home, this causes issues. Smart mesh WiFi can improve this if you put boosters in the house
Pedro said DT wants to grant WiFi stability for all. They have one app that covers all customer services from WiFi to smart home etc
Simon said customers want speed and reliability but you won’t win new customers on this messaging. There has been a huge growth of gaming since Covid and gamers want low latency. After the panel Simon said that gamers were one of the segments willing to pay for better service.
Steffen said a typical consumer has a low capacity to understand technical stuff – they just want to buy something and have it work. He thought smart home will be interesting but it was not clear who would win in this space – a lot of the Smarthome apps like connected fridges didn’t provide much use.
Simon said Comcast have been selling home security including leak sensors in the home. The biggest cause of loss in home insurance is water leakage so can put a sensor behind washing machine and under bath can alert people to the risk.
Sky just launched home protect – to disrupt the insurance market
Simon says Openreach dominates in the UK and building out fiber at a huge rate
Steffen – discussed the challenges of multi home units. While it’s easy to connect a house by sending a single engineer, in a block of flats you need to go to each flat. So door to door sales works well in rural areas but doesn’t in cities as even if you can ring all the bells in a block, most people will be out.
Flats also have more issues with WiFi as there is interference from the neighbours’ WiFi
Simon gave the example of Hyperoptic in the UK which focused on new build multi dwelling buildings working with landlords etc.
He discussed WiFi issues in flats as there is bleed from neighbours, and even within a flat the WiFi may need to pass through 2 walls. The best place to put a booster is often in the hallway
How to convince customers that they need fiber?
Simon said consumers care about 3 things
– speed
– connectivity as WFH especially when moving home
– Gamers want low latency
4. Panel: Leveraging data to improve customer loyalty
Richard Davis, Chief Data Officer of OFCOM said he used to work at a bank that merged several times and the issue was that data was in different systems, some very antiquated (even green screens). To make use of the data you need a common identifier.
Eija Moisala, Head of Digital Identity from Elisa Finland – head of digital identity talked about how to enhance sales and marketing with data
Richard said that even if the end result is a useful recommendation, customers can find it creepy that you have data about them
Eija said younger people more willing to share data whereas the most reluctant are older women and older wealthy men. The key to getting permission to using data was being transparent as to what you’ll do with it.
Eija said that AI is mostly coded by young men in India so that can lead to biases in the results it provides. She gave a very amusing example of this.
Richard talked about the risk of fraud as AI was getting better at creating credible time relevant data to fool people to give over passwords. Their internal tests showed that 14% of people were susceptible to phishing whereas in the past this was only 2%. Extrapolated across all of society this can have profound effects. Businesses need to start thinking about safety by design.
5. Interesting start ups
James Thomas of Jet Connectivity explained how they are putting 5G base stations on buoys and floating them into the North Sea to get 5G coverage around Wind and Wave Farms
Chris Lewis of Lewis Insight showed me an app that allows a person with a visual impairment to photograph a scene or person and get an audio description done by ChatGPT – he tried it on me and it was very accurate with the description of me and the environment around me
Nick Muir and Mark Trowbridge of ConXhub explained how their technology allowed telecoms to get more out of legacy 2nd generation networks.