Customer interaction in the Telco Industry

Digital technologies are enabling an ever more connected world - in a private as well as business context - and have a significant impact on the telecommunications industry. Services are becoming more readily available and convenient for telco customers and businesses are able to optimize and automate processes. Increasing digitization, however, also leads to new and different customer expectations in B2C and B2B interactions. Digital natives especially are demanding in terms of new products and services. These trends lead to a growing urgency for innovative ways to turn insights on telco customer behavior into future-proof business models.
Technological development is opening up new possibilities to meet customer wishes through, for example, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, Internet of Things, and Blockchain Technologies. However, growing processing power and analytics capabilities, combined with the increasing collection of customer data, also leads to legal challenges concerning data privacy and protection.
In this report, the authors first analyze trends in the field of customer interaction in the telco industry. From these findings, four scenarios are derived that vividly depict possible futures. In the final part, five business ideas are elaborated and validated in each of the four scenarios.
The concepts ideated range from an Artificial Intelligence-based customer care package, an Industrial Internet of Things platform, to a Computer-as-a-Service business model and a platform for personal data management.