The powerful presence of the telecom industry is responsible for boosting communication, workplace flexibility, and the worldwide market reach of every small & big company.
Telecom services have proven vital in the COVID-19 epidemic by providing video conferencing, mobile communication, and high-speed internet services. It is a huge comfort for companies trying to stay afloat in one of the toughest business environments.
Thousands of vendors partner with telecom operators to ensure service quality and continuity. The paperwork for service contracts, partnerships, and agreements takes up most of the vendors and the network solution providers.
When you have uncountable applications related to new service requests, agreements, and contracts, paper-based processes become time-consuming, costly, and increase customer dissatisfaction.
Customers get impatient if their requested services get delayed. In addition, failing to meet service quality standards increases the rate of customer churn.
Electronic signatures can help firms improve internal business processes and provide exceptional customer service.
Here is how the telecom industry can benefit from electronic signatures:
1) Improve customer experience
In the highly competitive telecom industry, customer experience is a critical factor in maintaining a competitive advantage. After the automobile and hotel industry, the telecom sector has the third-highest potential for increasing revenue by improving customer experience (CX). According to Forrester’s research’s CX index scoring system, telcos that increase CX scores by one point generate an additional USD 3.39 revenue in per-customer incremental revenue.
Another research by HBR states that customers with the most satisfying experiences spend an average of 140% more than those that have experienced a shortfall in customer experience.
Electronic signatures improve customer experience in telecom industry by
- Limiting time taking paperwork
- Blazing fast customer onboarding
- Enabling self service for faster response
- Eliminating waiting time to access telecom services
- Accelerated closing of vendor contracts
2) Acquire customers in record time
Guess about a single industry accepting new connection requests from uncountable customers every day.
You guessed it right! It’s the telecom industry that gets prepaid, postpaid and broadband connection applications from trillions of customers around the globe.
Order fulfillment at the right time is the biggest roadblock in new customer acquisition as the customer service team of every company has to accept, process & verify tons of physical documents for every service request.
Every online document in the electronic signature application can be signed, stored, and verified on the same day. It assures speedy acquisition of new customers compared to the competition, which is not using electronic signature technology.
The telecom business processes require a massive amount of paper due to handling a high volume of business data. It involves sharing extensive information with employees, business partners, vendors, OEMs, and others.
Management of data and documents in the telecom industry is of the highest priority. It has to ensure the documents’ security, validity, and integrity by having critical information about customers, contracts, & other confidential data.
Hand-written signatures on paper documents significantly slow down critical processes and have a detrimental effect on daily business operations.
You can digitally sign different documents in the telecom industry, some of which are:
- New connection requests
- Service requests and approvals
- Internet services documents
- Contracts and agreements
- Invoices
- E-statements
- Purchase orders (PO)
- Vendor agreements
4) Increase employee productivity and satisfaction
Sales employees spend most of the time-traveling, visiting client offices, follow-ups, and doing the usual printing, signing, scanning, and submitting customer applications, contracts, and other documents. They struggle to focus on their Key Result Areas (KRAs) due to these distractions and lack of time.
Electronic signatures boost employee productivity by rapidly closing sales much faster in comparison to physical documents. The sales team can focus on their job better as they don’t have to travel and do physical follow-ups with the clients anymore.
They can close sales, contracts, and agreements using eSignature applications from their offices or any other location and focus on other essential tasks like chasing monthly goals from other business accounts and meeting critical business deadlines connected with their KRAs.
5) Protect your loyal customers from telecom frauds
Telecom fraud is a severe threat to the telecommunication industry. Data fraud happens when the customers provide their ID documents during their onboarding stage in the company.
Another fraud SIM swap is a significant problem where scammers use fake IDs to access a subscriber’s SIM card. Then they use the SIM to authenticate transactions with the subscriber’s bank account and plunder his money to take full advantage of the situation.
Do you want to know the stage where customer IDs leak?
Customer IDs are leaked during the customer onboarding stage when companies receive physical documents from the customers.
How to avoid customer IDs leaks?
eSignature applications eradicate the time-consuming copying, scanning, and storing processes of physical documents. It is where there is a high probability of fraud due to leakage of customer data.
The technology stores the documents in digital format securely using cloud storage solutions that block all unauthorized attempts against data leaks.
Case Study
Telenor’s store in Norway ran on a franchise model. Multiple companies handled store operations that posed a significant customer support challenge due to the absence of a central document repository.
It forced the stores to manage paperwork and individual contracts at their own risk in warehouses.
If a customer approached a Telenor store to resolve their issues. Then it meant coming to the same store that had stored the documents of the customer. Another store could not service them due to the unavailability of customer documents.
Locating an older document meant a lot of work for the salesperson, as they had to travel to the document warehouse to search for the paper contract. It doesn’t always guarantee success as the crucial paper contracts get lost or damaged in storage facilities.
It resulted in customer dissatisfaction, increasing customer churn, as well as huge revenue loss.
Major Challenges
Support and Fraud
Slow resolution of customer issues as well as the fraud case due to decentralized documents
Customer churn
Large number of customers leaving Telenor & increasing churn costs
Presence of different systems
Multiple systems for sales, insurance, service, and finance increasing business operations complexity.
The Pain Point
- Searching paper documents submitted in different stores
- Paper documents getting lost
- Slow resolution of customer issue
- Rising cases of document fraud
Solution
Telenor adopted digital signature solutions for their rising needs. They used this technology to sign up documents generated by their internal systems and several partner systems.
The company was quickly able to digitize all the documents without any integration.
They got promising results:
- Store managers and owners began concentrating more on what they do best: selling their products and services.
- Customer support representatives started addressing customer issues on the first call due to rapid access to customer information.
- The fraud department discovered contracts that were previously impossible to locate.
Conclusion
Electronic signatures automate critical business processes in the telecom sector, boosting customer acquisition, sales, employee productivity, and customer loyalty. If you’d like to learn more about how e signature solutions would help your telecom operations run more efficiently, connect with us now.
