During the recent COVID pandemic, enterprises had to push in-house IT staff for network management. Enterprises realized that their telco partner cannot meet the modern-day network complexities. Due to increased customer demands and infrastructural complexity, CSPs (Communication Services Providers) face several challenges. As a result, CSPs fail to offer high service availability to their clients. In this age of increasing customer demands and digitization, CSPs quickly need to adapt to the changes. According to recent trends, telecoms are showing an interest in AIOps (Artificial Intelligence for IT Operations) for improving customer experience. Read on to know how AIOps can improve the telco customer experience.

CSPs need operational transformation for improving customer experience

The current customer support services of telcos follow a reactive approach. Telcos react after a customer informs them about any IT or network issue. Once a network incident has occurred, it will take some time to fix it. As a result, the service availability of the network will take a blow. For the same reason, telco customer support services need to be proactive. To complete the journey from reactive to proactive customer support, telcos need help from the best AIOps tools and products.

The growing complexity of networks and IT infrastructures is a challenge for telcos. Many factors contribute to the growing complexity of IT landscapes. For example, the number of M&A deals has increased after the COVID pandemic. When two corporate entities merge, their IT infrastructure grows and becomes more complex. As a result, telcos have to adapt to the changing needs to uplift service reliability.

Communication service providers are still figuring out ways to deal with increasing operational costs. The demand for cloud-based networks is increasing in the industry. Telcos find it challenging to offer proactive customer support across cloud-based networks. To drive innovation, many telcos have started to invest in cloud-native networks. It isn’t possible to deal with these challenges with manual efforts. CSPs have to leverage the power of AIOps to boost customer experience and service availability. CSPs need to go through operational changes and adopt AIOps-based solutions.

How is customer support becoming more challenging for CSPs?

The recent innovations in network technologies aren’t helping CSPs boost the customer experience. For example, consider the growth of 5G networks around the globe. Now, CSPs have to deal with more complexity as 5G technology is more complex than previous network technologies. Also, 5G networks are usually deployed across cloud-native environments. It is a challenge to provide proactive customer support across cloud platforms.

5G is just one of the technologies increasing complexities for CSPs. The rise of IoT (Internet of Things) devices and edge computing have also changed customer demands. The growth of virtual desktop infrastructure solutions has also increased the number of customer support hassles for CSPs. Gone are the days when voice and data communication services were tolerant of service issues. At present, digital communication services are less tolerant of service issues. An enterprise that uses a 5G network does not want its video conferences to be ended abruptly due to service issues.

When talking about 5G technology, we must not forget the network slicing capabilities. As more and more network slices can be created on a 5G network, service management becomes more complex. Due to the increase in network slices, CSPs are finding it hard to meet service-level agreements. With the increase of network slices, connected devices, and digital services, CSPs are finding it hard to monitor the KPIs. Without KPIs, CSPs cannot gain observability into the deployed networks. As a result, telcos fail to offer proactive customer support to the clients.

The usefulness of AIOps for telcos

How will AIOps enhance the telco customer experience? Well, telcos can track KPIs at all times with an AIOps-based analytics platform. Instead of waiting for a network failure, AIOps can help you track network issues even before they impact service availability. To avert a network failure or performance degradation, you can take proactive steps with the aid of an AIOps-based analytics platform. At present, telcos track KPIs based on some human-defined norms. Also, root cause analysis is performed only after network issues occur. The steps taken by AIOps to uplift telco customer experience are as follows:

• An AIOps-based analytics platform will collect granular data at all times from different sources. It includes service logs, app data, network data, and data from connected devices.
• An AIOps-based analytics platform will define trends for normal behaviour. Network behaviour can change over time, and AIOps is smart enough to recognize it.
• Based on the behaviour baseline created by AIOps, anomalies will be detected in the network. These anomalies will be detected even before the customer raises a query.
• The anomaly or outlier is compared against different data sets to find out if it is dependent on other events or not. With event correlation, telcos can identify the upcoming service issues.
• After event correlation, an AIOps-based analytics platform will forward the issue to the IT team. Along with forwarding the issue to IT teams, AIOps will also provide telecoms with actionable issues. Telcos will have everything to fix service issues quickly, thus boosting customer experience and service availability.

Proactive customer support is the future for CSPs

An AI automated root cause analysis solution is the need of the hour for telcos. With root cause, KPIs, and actionable insights, service issues can be fixed in no time. In the coming years, CSPs that ignore proactive customer support services may face an existential crisis. A single hour of network downtime can cost much to an enterprise. Your clients may ignore your services if service issues keep occurring at regular intervals. You need to fix network issues even before they occur to achieve the status of proactive customer support.

Telcos don’t have to worry about the accuracy of an AIOps-based analytics platform. With each incident or training data set, an AIOps-based analytics platform will improve its accuracy. Also, AIOps is highly efficient in monitoring cloud-native and virtual environments. Enhance the telco customer experience by using the best AIOps tools and products in 2022!