Brianne [00:00:05] Our workshop goal was to work through a set of customer journeys in the telecom space and how we might solution some of the problems that we see in a customer journey using generative AI. We focused primarily on what we'd call the peaks and valleys of the customer journey. We think about how do we go from that valley to a really peak experience, because it's one of those opportunities for the provider to really showcase what it means to be a customer of theirs.

Conner [00:00:35] We're going to be focusing on these two transition points, where we've got somebody who is onboarding onto an experience, and we're trying to move them more seamlessly through that, or they've encountered a problem with their network coverage, and we're trying to help resolve that more quickly. How can we get people out of this trough back to a peak, back to surprise, back to delight?

Preston [00:00:54] So it's frustrating changing carriers right now because you've got to think about: do you want to get a new phone? How do I port my phone number over? Or do I want to put my phone number over? I've got children, or I have a family, what about their phone numbers? Like how are all of those services being managed? So there's a lot of complexity there.

Brianne [00:01:11] It's hard for a customer to know where to go if they do want to change their service provider. So do they go on mobile? Do they go on web? Do they download the mobile app? Which mobile app do they download? And how can we make that easier for the customer? In the mobile app, maybe there's an opportunity to just have, "Hey, are you ready to switch and come join us?" And have some calls to action related to that directly in the mobile app without any sort of authentication. When you download the main app for whichever service provider you're going to, there's a call to action right there. "Hey, are you ready to switch? Put in these bits of information and we'll go ahead and do that for you." Because it's a very complicated process to turn off your cell phone service on one provider and then turn it on all on the back end, but we want to make it seamless to the customer.

Woody [00:02:01] Could we use AI to build robo-calling tools so that the carrier-to-carrier conversation could happen without stalling at the customer level, and have it behind the scenes, calling on behalf of the customer to further automate the somewhat painful process of migrating your number.

Conner [00:02:15] As with any industry, there's an enormous amount of data there, and ideally, what we want to do is make all of those data points talk to each other in a way that allows your brand, the one that I know, to communicate with me in a way that's personal and specific.

Woody [00:02:29] In how might we solve network outages, I think an easy opportunity is just better proactive communication. I mean, most users download apps. Getting rich push notifications to them to alert them that AT&T is aware there's an outage, what they're doing to solve, crews have been deployed, here is the scope, etc. It's going to prevent people from going on social media and ranting and preventing them from calling AT&T just to find out information that could easily be proactively shared with them. And we can use AI to get even smarter about who and how those messages are sent, and how we keep engaging with customers during downtime.

Conner [00:03:00] One of the emerging trends that we learned about from our subject matter experts is that it's really all about moving that customer service experience as far left as possible, so that rather than being reactive, we as a telecommunications company want to be proactive and engage with our customers before they even realize that there is a problem. And it's going to serve the dual purpose of making the customer experience way better — I, as a customer, am going to have a much better experience with the brand — but it's also making costs go way down for the business, because now you don't have people who are calling into call centers. You don't have people who are getting frustrated and churning from the mobile carrier.

Preston [00:03:35] One thing I liked that was reassuring to me, for sure, was seeing the people that I was in a group with already have so many use cases for AI in their mind for potential applications, like when we were speaking about potentially using a tool to aggregate customer reports and being able to leverage that in some sort of proactive messaging. A lot of those mechanisms were things that we really wouldn't have thought about a year ago, but we're starting to develop a maturity on our outlook on it. And I can see that being beneficial to us in the future.

Woody [00:04:06] We believe that AI provides an opportunity to make change in weeks, not months. And to validate and prove that point, we're actually going to build software. We're going to demonstrate that the ideas we're coming up with, it can be powered by AI, can be ideated, designed, and built in a matter of weeks. And that's what we're going to be doing over the course of this process, is showing how we went from ideation through all the way to delivery to show you that these ideas aren't multi-year processes.

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