Providing a better buyer experience in the telecommunications industry

Providing relevant offerings to buyers at every stage of their journey requires a granular understanding of the B2B customer experience. With new technologies and market shifts shaping buyer expectations, B2B organizations, such as technology providers, need to constantly evaluate their buyer journey to enhance customer satisfaction in an already competitive environment.

A leading global telecommunications provider facing this challenge was keen to understand the buyer journey more deeply to deliver a customer-centric experience. By uncovering the barriers in the buyer journey and the factors that influence how they choose products and suppliers, it aimed to provide customers with the right support they needed at each stage.

They partnered with Netscribes to conduct a B2B customer experience study analyzing buyer experiences across the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.

About the client

Our client is a provider of telecommunication services worldwide. Its services include voice and data transmission, networking, IoT, cloud security, and other custom solutions catering to both B2B and B2C customers.

Business challenge and objective

There can be significant information asymmetry in the telecommunications and IT industry, making it challenging for businesses to find, purchase, and manage telecom services.
Determined to provide a more customer-centric experience for buyers of telecom services, our client was keen to understand what was broken in the existing process.
By understanding the buyer journey and the factors that influence how they choose products and suppliers, it aimed to provide customers with the right support they needed at each stage. As a global telecom provider, it sought to analyze buyer experiences across the US, Europe, and the Asia Pacific.

Netscribes solution

The company turned to Netscribes to gain insight into the telecom buyer behavior and identify the barriers in their journey.
Netscribes used a combination of primary and secondary research to facilitate meaningful analysis of customer behavior.
We first sought to determine the various players involved in the path to purchase – right from an organization’s employees as the end-product users to procurement officers as buyers, C-level executives as influencers, various departmental heads as decisions makers and finally network architects and specialists as the need initiators.
Next, our team employed a top-down approach to understand the fundamental aspects in the user-experience journey of our client’s customers. It involved the following steps:

• Identify the user’s challenge and the decision-making process for a purchase
• Map challenges to specific internal or external triggers
• Analyze requirements and vendor assessment criteria to solve them
• Recommend solutions based on our client’s offerings

We applied this methodology to uncover typical buyer scenarios and insights across five broad business needs that our clients served:

• 1.  Security

• 2.  Service delivery

• 3.  Complex infrastructure

• 4.  Data storage

5.  Integration

For instance, data security is an intrinsic need for organizations looking to expand their business and achieve digital transformation. Lack of visibility into the network’s infrastructure and inability to assess current security maturity are a few internal triggers driving this need.
To uncover how stakeholders scout for a solution, our team implemented a combination of primary research that involved interviewing relevant decision-makers across firms, regions, etc. and secondary research that scoured competitors’ websites, industry and government publications, news publications, and more, for contextual insights.
We used the insights drawn from both these sources to determine the requirements buyers have, both essentials and good-to-haves, while evaluating solution providers.
Buyers looking for security solutions, for example, sought the following:

Essentials:

• Integrated optimized security solutions
• Advanced threat management capabilities
• Identification of network traffic patterns to correlate cost to benefits

Good-to-haves:

• Advanced predictive security and context-aware, actionable security intelligence that exploits next-generation analytics to detect suspicious patterns
• Tailored solution based on industry trends and vital business needs with the goal of preparing business for growth, while reducing security complexity

Our study identified the factors influencing buyer decisions, including the product features, the selection criteria, and the information they sought for vendor evaluations.

For instance, buyers looking for network security solutions were influenced by the following factors:

Selection criteria:

• Local presence and delivery to ensure prompt incident response
• Delivering offerings that suit business needs and optimizes existing investment

Product features:

• Up-to-date and comprehensive security intelligence and protection
• Data and access centric – by integrating big data and analytics

Evaluation:

• Use cases
• Proofs of concept
• Pricing benchmarks
• Customer satisfaction surveys
• Third-party vendor assessment

To help our client provide buyers with the right support, we provided probable solutions aligned to buyer needs and identified best practices based on the insights gathered from our research.

For example, for buyers seeking security solutions, we recommended that our client offer its advanced managed security solution, including capabilities such as advanced perimeter systems (APS), SIEM, and security operations. We also identified relevant business models and bundling opportunities to better meet current buyer needs.

Results delivered

Through this B2B customer experience, we armed our client with tangible insights into their customers’ buying journey. This involved:

• Target audience identification and analysis
• Challenges and needs that convert to buyer requirements
• Internal and external factors influencing buyer needs
• Ways to cater to buyer requirements and factors impacting buying decisions
• Criteria influencing provider selection, such as brand, local presence, market share, and competitor landscape
• Buyer requirement mapping with the relevant persons from the provider side
• Post-purchase usage analysis of usage patterns, benefits, challenges, and improvement areas