Telco Customer Experience: Three Lessons We’ve Learned Pursuing Customer Happiness

The Need to Redefine Telco CX

Back in the pre-3G era, our telecommunications industry was characterized by limited innovation and a focus on traditional service delivery. Meyer and Schwager’s 2007 article in Harvard Business Review, Understanding Customer Experience, that telcos were infamous for being self-serving and indifferent to their customer service quality.  

Some of their examples might still be relatable to this day:¹

This reflected the average telco’s indifference to their customers’ experiences at the time. Some customers were so frustrated with the status quo that they decided to shake it up by providing a truly customer-centric experience. In 2014, Circles.Life was born.

We wanted to do awaywith self-serving experiences designed to frustrate customers - so no maze-likecontracts and no lock-in periods. We eventually developed a customer experiencebased on five pillars:

Over the years, we have refined these pillars and shared the results of our learnings with our telco clients. Our clients’ digital telco brands have gone on to win awards such as Best Telco in Asia’s Telecom Awards and Best Mobile App and Digital Ambassador Award.

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But we don’t want to leave you out. Here are three lessons we’ve learned from this customer experience approach.

1. Giving Control Back to the Customers Through Transparency and Flexibility

Transparency and Clarity

Ever experienced bill shock? That’s the feeling we get when we see that this month’s bill is 30% higher than what you paid last month.

It turns out that billing issues and bill shock influence whether customers will remain loyal to your telco. Studies, such as Ribeiro et al.’s [date] study of 2000 customer interactions, have shown that billing-related satisfaction influences telco customer loyalty. ²

On top of Ribeiro’s study, Portugal’s telecommunications regulator noted that bill-related issues and even the bill itself are major sources of consumer complaints.³ A report prepared for the Australian Customer Complaints and Media Authority (ACMA) noted that bill shock, receiving higher bills than expected, was a major contributor to customer complaints.⁴

When it comes to telcos, bill shock is enabled by intentionally confusing bills so that more costs can be hidden. Once the bill shock sets in, the contract’s lock-in period prevents you from quickly switching providers in the hope that your burning passion for finding a new provider will subside before the contract expires.

We really hate bill shock. We’ve focused on developing bills with no hidden fees, so what people see in their contracts is all they will pay with no strings attached. Our app also comes with monitoring dashboards that are designed to be easy to understand and use.

This was validated in a recent NPS survey. Some of our promoters told us that transparent billing was indeed one of the reasons that they stayed with our digital mobile operator brand, Circles.Life.

Building A System That Supports Flexible Products and Seamless Experiences

To us, control means letting our customers choose the options and add-ons they want without any constraints or unwanted extras.

To do this, we focused on simplifying our range of offers but providing full flexibility to add any add-ons they wanted. No more bulky and confusing catalogs. That way, this experience in this 2-minute video can remain a relic of the past:

We wanted people to stay with us because they wanted to and not because we locked them in. This led to no-contract plans, giving the freedom to stop or resume as they chose. 

We wanted to do away with long and tedious onboarding times. We optimized our onboarding process so that it can be done online and finished in minutes, with new products rolled out when requested. 

In our zeal, we quickly realized it was too complicated for traditional software vendors to enable the experience we wanted to provide our customers - so we built the platform ourselves. 

Our full-stack telco platform is designed to deliver the flexibility and speed modern customers expect. It integrates robust data analytics, an optimized app experience for seamless onboarding in minutes, and a framework for rapid product launches.

Additionally, we’ve built features that actively capture customer feedback during interactions, enabling us to refine and enhance our product offerings continuously.

These combined capabilities are crafted to elevate digital telco customer experiences and establish new benchmarks for the industry.

Today, this platform powers our telco clients' digital mobile operator brands in markets such as Japan, Indonesia, and the Middle East.

2. Putting Customers First Needs Teamwork and Software

Time for a cliché

“People change”

In our industry’s case, people develop new needs and behaviors, such as being digital nomads or using mobile data for entertainment and everyday activities, and we need to keep up with them.Fortunately, we have tools to keep up with people’s demands: real-time customer feedback, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and voice-of-customer (VOC) insights.

In our industry’s case, people develop new needs and behaviors, such as being digital nomads or using mobile data for entertainment and everyday activities, and we need to keep up with them.

Fortunately, we have tools to keep up with people’s demands: real-time customer feedback, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and voice-of-customer (VOC) insights.

People move quickly, and we need to respond to their feedback by launching updates and products just as quickly.

Customer service interactions were shown to impact customer loyalty in Ribeiro et al.’s 2024 study.2 Meyer and Schwager, in their 2007 Harvard Business Review article, also added that when telcos move too slowly when responding to customer feedback, people could perceive it as a lack of concern for them. Customer frustration and disengagement usually follow.⁵

Launching products quickly requires tight collaboration between marketing, product, tech, and customer happiness teams. One example is how we responded to customer feedback on social media asking for more data and tailored services. In a few months, our team rapidly launched the ‘20 GB for $20 Data Add-on’ plan, smaller customizable SMS bundles, and unlimited incoming call add-ons for them.

3. Embracing Real-time Data and Automation for Customer Support

Embracing real-time data and automation is not just hype. We experienced a major breakthrough for ourselves when we embraced them. Here are some examples:

Automating mundane tasks, on the other hand, helps to keep our team focused on more involved customer support activities that require a human touch.

One example is our automated reports for SIM card inventory. With Circles.Life's fully digital experience, SIM cards are delivered directly to subscribers' doorsteps. In every market we operate, proactive system alerts help the operations team track inventory levels, allowing them to focus on managing delivery expectations for our customers through the delivery slot manager instead of manually checking stock.

What We’ve Achieved

In today’s internet age, we’re all telco consumers. By avoiding experiences we ourselves would hate, we aimed to build great customer experiences for both our and our client’s subscribers. So far, the brands we are supporting have won customer experience awards in Singapore, Japan, and the Middle East. 

We’ve learned that customer service experiences supported by real-time data monitoring, rapidly acting on feedback, and designing transparency to reduce bill-shock help deliver customer experiences that lead to loyalty and growth.

However, the playing field is always evolving, and there is always more we can do to make customer experiences smoother, more seamless, and personalized and push the boundaries of what it means to put customers first.

If you’re ready to transform your customer experience and achieve industry-leading NPS scores, let’s talk. Together, we can create telco experiences that delight customers and drive success.