Staying Connected: Enhancing Customer Engagement with Mobile Stories and Snaps

Customer engagement is never easy. Whether you work in air traffic, fitness, or digital marketing, you will find your fair share of trouble when trying to engage your customers. You not only have to understand them, but you also have to use modern tools to convince them to engage with your brand. Seeing that these issues tend to be industry-specific, we feel that the best way to analyze them is one industry at a time. With that in mind, let's take a closer look at telecommunication companies and how they can better connect with their customers.

The trouble with customer engagement

To properly understand this problem let's first outline the common issues that telecommunication companies face.

Frequent price wars

It shouldn't come as much of a surprise that telecommunication companies have a hard time differentiating between each other. While you may feel that your company is significantly different from your competitors, know that your customers likely don't feel the same way. For them, all telecommunication companies are pretty much the same. Just like there isn't much difference between airline companies, except the ticket price. Telecommunications services like mobile plans, internet packages, and phone devices often appear similar across providers. This makes it difficult for you to stand out from your competition based solely on your offerings.

As a result, the most common way companies market themselves is by offering cheaper services and/or products. This has to a large-scale commoditization of the telecommunication market. Here, price wars are common which leads to diminishing profit margins for companies. So, you either have to lower your profit margins enough to be competitive, or you risk losing your entire customer base.

Relative complexity

Another aspect that telecommunication companies face is the relative brand complexity. While you may feel that your brand is fairly self-explanatory and that your customers should have little problem understanding what you are about, this likely isn't the case. For instance, to the average person, a telecommunication system is quite complex. Technical aspects such as network infrastructure, bandwidth, and data speeds, while simple to you, can be difficult to understand for everyday customers. This will be a problem if you wish to engage your customers by outlining the technical strengths of your network.

Secondly, telecommunication companies tend to offer a wide range of service plans. In those, we can usually find varying features, add-ons, and terms. This, adds another layer of complexity for consumers in choosing the right plan for their needs. A service plan that caters to a specific customer may be just the leverage you need to improve your engagement rates. But, even a top-notch plan won't benefit you unless you are able to explain it properly.

Thirdly, telecommunication is closely connected to technological advancements. New network infrastructure, the introduction of new devices, the emergence of disruptive technologies like IoT and 5G... All of these can introduce further confusion among your customers. And if you don't help your customers adopt them, it can lead to dissatisfaction.

Poor customer satisfaction

No telecommunication network is perfect. Regardless of how robust yours is, you will face problems like network outages, slow internet speeds, and dropped calls. If you combine this with poor customer service you will likely see customers leave you with little regard. Furthermore, it is by no means uncommon for telecommunication companies to have billing errors, unexpected charges, and confusing billing statements. These, if not tacked properly,  will create distrust and frustration among customers. Such mistakes lower the overall trust your customers have in your company, which can be a difficult hole to climb out of.

Fragmented audience

All telecommunications companies try to serve as many customers as possible. This leads to having a broad range of customers with diverse demographics, lifestyles, and communication needs. While you can try to cater more to a certain demographic, the best practice is to try and reach as many customers as possible. This can be challenging as optimizing your marketing content for various demographics can be quite difficult. Seeing that your marketing recourses are limited, you will need to carefully construct your content so that it is easy to edit for a specific group.

Limited brand loyalty

A loyal customer base is something that all telecommunication companies dream of. But, unfortunately, this dream rarely becomes reality. For one, customers have grown to expect low switching costs in the telecommunications industry. This, as it turns out, is a problem when it comes to retaining customers. If you were to increase switching costs, you would have problems with customer acquisition. So, it's a delicate balancing act. Enabling your customers with an easy way to cut their ties with you, doesn't really promote brand loyalty. Any negative experiences, such as poor customer service or network reliability issues, can further erode brand loyalty and drive customers to seek alternatives.

How to use mobile stories and snaps to solve telecommunication industry problems

So, a bunch of problems, and none of them easy. You have a complex product, that has to somehow find its customers in a saturated market where customers are encouraged to constantly look for something better. And once you have got a grip on your customers, you need to actively work on keeping them engaged with your brand. Tough. Luckily, there are ways to tackle these problems and use StorifyMe for telecom.

Price wars - solution

One way to go about this is to fully engage in price wars with your competition. While this is viable, we don't advise that it be your only solution. Instead, you ought to consider outlining a clear way in which you will differentiate yourself from your competition.

Ideally, you will carefully consider your customer base and outline specific ways in which a telecommunication company can aid in their everyday life. For instance, if you are situated in a place where there are a lot of tourists, you can look to provide deals that cater to them. Short-term plans that provide ample data and minutes, along with an app that is easy to install and follow. This can be a great way to convince newcomers to do business with you instead of your competition. Especially if you also dynamically translate your app, your stories, and your snaps dynamically to better aid foreign customers. Here stories can help with the onboarding process, as well as provide valuable tourist info about the area. You can even look to cross-promote with other businesses that cater to tourists.

This is just one instance where a bit of creativity can go a long way. So, don't try to outbid your competition, but try to provide something that they've failed to recognize as necessary or valuable.

Relative complexity - solution

One of the best ways to explain complex systems to modern audiences is through snaps and shorts. There are a couple of reasons why this is so. Firstly. modern customers tend to react best to visual content. TikTok is a clear example of how prevalent we are to watch videos and photos, instead of reading through written content. As such, if you are looking for a piece of content to engage the attention of your viewers, snaps and shorts and your best bet.

Secondly, through snaps and shorts, you can explain fairly complex systems. The way you do this is through visual storytelling. Basically, you separate a complex subject into smaller information bits and then explain those bits through multiple content instances. That way, your customers don't have to bring their attention and focus on one long content format, but simply enjoy and understand multiple shorter ones.

Lastly, both snaps and shorts can be easily modified. With StorifyMe you remain the one and only owner of your content (unlike Social Media). So, if need be, you can change whatever needs to be to help your customers better understand you. You can even track their reactions to your content in order to better optimize it.

Poor customer satisfaction - solution

To have decent customer satisfaction you need to have a decent CRM system. This not only entails the necessary CRM software but also a customer management team that knows how to best represent your brand. Unfortunately, no matter how big your team is, they will have a hard time keeping up with customer needs. Even if you make your app intuitive and design a top-notch onboarding process, you will still face a ton of customers.

To aid this, you can look to utilize snaps and shorts. Namely, most of the customer problems are fairly frequent and simple to solve. This is why telecommunication companies often opt for a FAQ page. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to convince customers to go through pages of written content to solve their issues. Well, a way to solve this is to substitute your FAQ page (or at least the most visited parts of it) with snaps and shorts. You are far more likely to keep customers occupied and aid them if you show them what to do with a video, and then tell them what to do with written content.

Fragmented audience - solution

By carefully using snaps and shorts you can learn a lot about your audience. Namely, before integrating them with your online presence, you should look to introduce analytic systems. All the marketing content in the world won't help you unless you have a clear idea of who you are trying to reach. Once you have a decent understanding of your customer base, you can look to personalize your content. What you do is separate your customer base into different groups (segmentation) and then create content for each segment. Both snaps and shorts can be dynamic. This means that you can set up a system to change them based on who the viewer is. In this way, you will have a much easier time tackling your fragmented audience.

Limited brand loyalty - solution

Keeping your customers loyal to your brand isn't an easy or an overnight ordeal. Keep in mind that some competitors will, at some point, provide a deal that will seem alluring. As such, you need to provide a clear incentive for them to stay loyal. There are two aspects to this, financial and emotional.

From the financial standpoint, you need to give your customers long-term benefits of staying loyal. Once they are faced with an alluring offer, they need to consider what they will lose if they leave you. Loyalty discounts, seasonal offers to long-term customers, temporary benefits, gifts... All these are viable rewards that will go a long way in keeping your customer base loyal. And you can easily outline these loyalty rewards through snaps and shorts.

From an emotional standpoint, you need to make your customers feel as if they are a part of your brand. This entails developing a clear line of communication with your customers. You need to have an active social media page where you will talk with your customers. Answer their questions and always motivate them to keep asking and commenting. Include them in the decision regarding your company and ask them whether you should alter something. Also, comment on their content. You, as a brand, should have an online presence that seems as natural as possible. The more you do, the more your customers will that they can trust you.

Final thoughts

We, of course, don't feel as if we've covered all the problems that telecommunication companies face. There are numerous other issues where snaps and shorts would be of little help. But, when it comes to telecommunication customer engagement, we do feel that they are grossly underutilized. So, if you are looking for a way to boost your company, we are sure that StorifyMe will be of help.

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