The necessity for delightful customer experiences (CX) has steadily risen in the last few years. Customers of all businesses across industries evaluate the experience against benchmarks set by digital natives such as Amazon, Netflix, YouTube, Apple and Uber.

Clearly, delighting customers alone isn’t enough – telecom, media and entertainment (TME) businesses need to lead the pack. In this article, you’ll see how experience leadership drives business growth, what matters to customers and how businesses can apply these findings to fuel their top line.

Experience leadership: What exactly does it mean?

Experience leadership refers to a paradigm in which a brand's CX sets the benchmark in its industry and larger market. However, the rules for experience leadership vary across sectors and even segments within the same industry.

For instance, customers value personalized recommendations in TME's B2C lines, whereas customers find value in personalized products and services in TME's B2B lines. In telecom, convenience rules: The ability to detect (if not anticipate) service disruptions and offer an intuitive journey for fixing the issue is of special importance.

Ultimately, experience leadership acknowledges the value that a service or a product delivers to a customer. For instance, a media subscription becomes less impactful to a customer who finds it difficult to get relevant content. Similarly, telecom service disruptions are distressing and the effort spent troubleshooting only adds to the dissatisfaction.

How convergence is changing experience leadership

With the convergence of the telecom, media, entertainment and social media sectors, new possibilities are emerging for TME companies to exploit. For instance, sports entertainment players can collaborate with 5G network providers to augment event experience with 360-degree views, live replays and up-to-date stats. HCLTech, for example, is working with Cricket Australia to deliver enhanced fan engagement through various technology solutions.

Likewise, TME companies can forge strategic collaborations to enrich their first-party data, enabling them to win increased mindshare with the power of bundled subscriptions.

Impact of experience leadership on top-line growth

CX leadership drives top-line growth in many ways:

• Reduced churn: Experience leadership improves retention and preserves existing revenue. Telecom leaders have churn rates under 3%, whereas the industry average is in double digits
• Brand advocacy: With the convergence of social media and entertainment, word of mouth plays an increasingly important role in influencer culture. Positive experiences spread rapidly, leading to organic growth
• First-party data: In TME, experience leaders win a greater share of first-party data, such as engagement data, usage and billing data, geospatial data, social behaviors (watch parties/contacts) and device data. This unlocks opportunities for personalization and sharpening marketing efforts, and can be used for driving data-driven monetization. The data itself is all the more valuable amid stringent privacy regulations and a cookieless internet.

Experience leaders can create a positive feedback loop with these multiplier effects to set self-propelling growth machinery into motion. They can also build new revenue streams with first-party data at hand to course-correct new product/feature development. Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Generative AI (GenAI) are key to this equation, as they mobilize first-party data, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale

How to achieve customer experience leadership

There’s lots of room for improvement, since only 18% of customers feel that TME companies are meeting expectations. This means that most TME companies are not yet experience leaders.

So, how exactly can TME companies become CX leaders?

The key to customer experience leadership lies in building core operating model capabilities that underpin the customer journey and the product or service itself. For telcos, this may mean an overhaul of their customer journey, from onboarding to post-service, and building easy, intuitive apps for seamless experience delivery. Levergaing AI capabilities can help inject intuitiveness into the customer journey (for instance, with proactive detection of service disruptions) and GenAI wrappers can be leveraged to hyper-personalize high-touch service experiences. For M&E companies, the path to customer experience leadership might lie in facilitating content discovery (using powerful AI-based reocmmender systems), delivering niche content to customers and deeply understanding a customer's viewing trends. In M&E, GenAI can facilitate easier content discovery by enhancing searchability of catalogs and enhancing audience/fan engagement.

It’s worth noting that CX leadership initiatives pay beyond expectations. In fact, 72% of TME decision-makers say that the impact of personalization on revenue and customer lifetime value exceeded their expectations.

What next?

In an era of continuous entertainment, always-on connectivity and displays that never go dark, the TME industry has a lot of untapped potential to exploit. However, customers pay close attention to the experience delivered by TME services and evaluate them according to benchmarks set by digital natives.

Winning will require TME companies to aim for experience leadership. With a more significant top line and increased first-party data as the rewards, investing in experience leadership is more than justified.