If you carry a mobile phone or smartphone, chances are, you’re aware that the customer care offered by wireless carriers isn’t always what it should be. While customer satisfaction rates have crept up for many carriers in recent years – heavy customer churn and competition have forced these companies to get serious with the quality of the customer experience they offer – there is still significant room for improvement.
Given how large the U.S. cell phone market is, it’s not a surprise that solutions providers would debut products aimed directly at customer care for mobile network operators (MNO). Many solutions providers are building analytics into their products and services to help find efficiencies and offer more personalized customer experiences.
Mobile intelligence solutions provider Carrier iQ is debuting a set of new machine learning algorithms designed to improve customer care for carriers this week at Mobile World Congress. The algorithms are part of the most recent release of Carrier iQ's iQ Care solution, a suite of analytics and applications designed to help MNOs reduce customer care costs, increase subscriber satisfaction and reduce churn.
Adding intelligence and analytics to solutions can help fill in the blanks where human customer care reps – which also see significant churn – miss opportunities. The new capabilities added to iQ Care were designed to accomplish this by automatically detecting the existence of customer experience issues and diagnosing the root cause, according to Carrier iQ. Using machine-learning algorithms, iQ Care is capable of automatically diagnosing customer experience issues, such as short battery life, high data usage and poor voice quality, and communicates the results using explicit, precise and actionable alert messages to support personnel, reducing the time to resolution of customer issues, improving customer satisfaction and first-call resolution (FCR) rates. The features can also help prevent unnecessary device returns.
"iQ Care revolutionizes customer care for mobile subscribers, with capabilities that were never thought possible,” said Bruce Lacey, VP of engineering for Carrier iQ, in a statement. “In addition to revolutionizing customer care, Carrier iQ's patented technologies pave the path for proactive care and, ultimately, for self-care. They are the expression of our technology and thought leadership in advanced big data mobile analytics, that leverage the insights gained from millions of subscriber devices," he added.
The new features are being presented at this week’s Mobile World Congress event in Barcelona, Spain.