AI in Telecommunications — How is Technology Transforming the Telcos?

The use of AI in telecommunications derives better customer experience. It helps the industry better understand its customers, which is the ultimate goal of any business, including telecommunication.

The implementation of this technology is helping telcos seek modernization in the network while magnifying the revenue streams. On the other hand, AI pushes telecom operators to experience new opportunities from top-line growth and operational effectiveness perspective.

Although, the technology has already engrossed the telecom industry, with the prediction of more to engross in telcos in the coming years. The use of AI in telecommunications is immensely popular (for some obvious reasons).

This article clearly explains how AI in telecommunications is already transforming the telecom industry, and how it is ready to accept more of it.

Four Areas where AI is Transforming the Telecom Industry

Communication service providers in the telecom industry have set their focus and AI investment on these four main areas:

1. Churn Prediction
2. Virtual Assistants
3. Network Optimization
4. RPA

1. Churn Prediction:

The accelerating churn rate is the greatest challenge for telecom operators to combat. Telcos can make the most of churn prediction and churn analytics to create better customer profiles, allowing their industry to rely on an effective strategy to retain customer loyalty.

Even the most successful telecom operators rely on churn prediction leveraged by AI to figure out the best strategy (to take action) before the customer leaves.

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Why else should you keep track of Customer churn prediction?

Customer churn prediction brings in several benefits, like:

1. Profit Maximization — Churn prediction helps you focus on selling to existing customers rather than acquiring new customers, which otherwise is an expensive deal.
2. Higher Customer Retention — Using customer churn prediction, it is easy to identify which customers are willing to leave. Telcos can prepare custom strategies for every customer.
3. Strategize Business — This prediction identifies the root cause of customers leaving the telecom services or products. With AI in telecommunications, it is easy to dig the root cause of customer churn to build more effective strategies for the users.

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2. Virtual Assistants

AI in telecommunications also allows telecom operators to leverage the power of virtual assistants. Tuning to this technology gives telecom operators the power to take up massive installation requests, set up, and maintain. That sometimes overwhelms the customer service centers. Using Artificial Intelligence in Telecommunications, telecom operators can implement self-service capabilities, which help customers to install, manage, and operate their devices themselves.

Gartner Predicts 25 Percent of Digital Workers Will Use Virtual Employee Assistants Daily by 2021.

Voice assistants are more embedded in our lives now and that is evident when devices like Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa are used almost every day.

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Three Ways AI in Telecommunications (Virtual Assistants) Improves Customer Experience

1. Deliver 24x7 Customer Service

• First, it cuts down the human intervention and self automates the business operations. So, in case any issue occurs, customers will be able to solve it on their own.
• Human-assisted support and conversational chatbots allow users to receive satisfactory answers to their queries.
• Virtual assistants’ self improves.

2. Solves Emerging Issues Quicker

• Virtual assistants have integrated NLP or Natural Language Processing solutions that improve conversation for solving issues and concerns faster.
• Customers don’t have to call. Issues are solved just by sending the messages. The time and efforts customers need to solve the problem are minimal.
• Virtual assistants understand the concerns in seconds and solve them right away.

3. Simplified First-Line Support

• Telcos deal with first-line issues almost every day, and they know how repetitive these problems are. Virtual assistants untangle first-line support and let telcos keep these issues at bay.
• Virtual Assistants allow telecom operators to focus on productive activities by solving most of the queries related to network availability.
• Nokia’s MIKA is one of the examples of how efficiently AI in telecommunications is helping.
• Advanced AI can even process refunds and send quick updates regarding the same.

3. Network Optimization

CSPs can build self-optimizing networks leveraging AI, allowing telecom operators the ability to improve network performance and quality. The advanced algorithms that identify the pattern within the data can help telecom companies to predict network anomalies. Using AI in telecommunications, it becomes easier to solve problems way before the customers are negatively affected.

As per Fior Markets, “31.5% of the telecommunication organizations are primarily focusing to leverage existing investments/infrastructure and the rest 63.5% are making new technology investments for AI systems and these continue to be global trends.”

Telecom companies are constantly finding ways to achieve automated, effective, and smarter network operations. Machine learning helps telcos in optimizing network performance KPIs and KQIs for deploying real-time views of the network to the telecom engineers. AI in telecommunications enables a seamless network orchestration across the complete network.

AI techniques allow telecom operators to enjoy:

• Effective service optimization
• Facilitate self-optimization of the network
• Integrate capacity planning into a software-defined network
• Timely delivery of real-time insights
• Complete Automation
• Reliable customer service

4. Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Communication Service Providers indulge massive customer engagement in millions of transactions daily. That makes it easily susceptible to human mistakes and hindrance in smooth communication. That’s when Robotic Process Automation’s efficiency can be leveraged to bring effectiveness to the telecom industry.

The telecommunication industry can manage its immense rule-based and repetitive actions. RPA manages tasks like:

• Workforce management
• Order fulfillment
• Data Entry
• Billing

And, gives them more time to invest in valuable activities of the business.

Deloitte says, 40% of Telecom, Media, and Tech executives say they have garnered “substantial” benefits from cognitive technologies, with 25% having invested $10 million or more. More than three-quarters expect cognitive computing to “substantially transform” their companies within the next three years.

Some examples of RPA in Telecommunication are as follows:

• Nokia AVA
• UiPath

The Telecom industry has to suit up to cope with the increasing demand of service requests. The use of RPA in telecom helps telcos efficiently address service requests. RPA in telecommunication can boost customer service, data quality, cost minimization, and operational efficiency.

With the integration of RPA in telecommunication, we can expect:

1. Periodic report maintenance & distribution
2. Tracking competitor prices
3. Quicker response to partner queries and concerns

Conclusion

Artificial Intelligence is already utilized in telecommunications, and as a result, the telecom business has become more sophisticated and available. The Telecom industry is one of the fastest-growing industries that leverage the power of AI to improve customer experience, enhance network reliability, and even fraud detection.

AI has the potential to spot illegal activities, thefts, and anomalies, making it easier for analysts to deliver a real-time response. AI is growing in the telecommunications space, and it will continue to evolve in the coming years.