Welcome to the second part of our four-part series on mobile consumer insights featuring Singapore! This post covers consumers’ attitudes towards what contributes to a telco’s ‘premium’ brand image.

In our first post, we highlighted four different mobile consumer segments: Flexibility and freedom-loving Digital Vanguards, discerning and critical Savvy Selectors, value-chasing Price Chasers, and disengaged Passives.

Interestingly, neither a telco's age nor its many physical stores contribute to building a premium image among consumers.

Instead, customer experience and value-for-money factors were given a higher weightage. 

These include:

What struck us as interesting was how the top three factors relate to the customer experience. These factors include:

These factors are traditionally associated with an in-store experience. One main reason we shop offline is for the expert, personal touch a well-versed salesperson can bring while enjoying a pleasant physical environment. But when it comes to people getting used to digital experiences and digital natives who grew up with this, expectations have changed.

Digital platforms now enable the easy access to and purchase of a wide range of products. Coupled with the ability to collect and analyze large amounts of real-time data to provide hyper-personalised recommendations, consumers are increasingly starting their customer journeys online and staying there entirely.

Another reason consumers used to heavily prefer an offline experience at the advent of digital platforms was trust. But in today’s world, where many types of transactions and, realistically speaking, a large amount of our lives are spent online, digitally native consumers have a lot more trust in digital channels and are more concerned with the experience of using these channels.

An exceptional telco service in this case includes the sales experience, whether offline or online, how well the selected service offerings match customer needs, the connectivity and stability of the connection and just as importantly, their customer service experience. 

All of these highlight the importance of customer-centricity in every initiative and customer-facing interaction. These now take place primarily on digital apps for mobile service providers in Singapore. 

Circles, via Circles.Life was among the first to introduce an all-digital experience with no physical stores in 2016. We built our mobile app infrastructure from the ground up to be customer-centric and also made no contract plans popular.

Considering that we don’t focus on physical stores, the importance of delivering the right rewards and service offerings to the right customers to let them select the plan that suits them best was paramount. 

With that in mind, we built our digital app to be flexible, accommodating different types of rewards and offerings based on customer data while delivering them quickly to customers. The app would also be their go-to hub for billing and revenue management.

Today, digital apps are a necessity among telecommunications service providers in Singapore, with digital customer interactions being the norm rather than the exception.

The idea has always been to give more control back to the customer and make sure that they always feel front and centre in the experience. This is why our motto has always been “giving power back to the customer”

But how does giving that power to the customer look like? What exactly are Singaporean mobile consumers looking for in their smartphone experience?

Stay tuned for our next post where we cover that: Consumers are Looking for ‘More,’ for ‘Flexibility’ and ‘Accessibility in Their Digital Experience.

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This is part two of our Telco Customer Insights series featuring Singapore.

Catch the other posts below: