May 23
Important Lessons About The Telecommunication Industry You Need To Learn Before you hit 40
Introduction
Cellphones are incredibly useful and in fact a necessary tool in our daily lives. One of the biggest factors of globalization is the fact that humans are now able to not only communicate and connect but have all the information they need and then some at their fingertips. All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the telecommunication industry.
Today, the telecommunication industry is worth somewhere in the vicinity of $50 billion dollars. The larger the industry, the more impact it creates in society, whether good or bad is a separate point altogether.
Telecom in Canada
The telecom services offered in Canada are one of the most expensive in the whole world, even compared to the US where the prices are almost a third of what they are in Canada. Moreover, Canadians don’t have that many options for choosing their provider which means the competition is tremendous.
Negative reviews by customers
I have heard countless people criticize the telecom industry, mostly people who are customers. They say things like: “it’s a monopoly, like any other industry”. And no doubt there is always a clash between the different providers, I.e, they are always trying to retain current customers, keeping them from switching to their competitors, or trying to gain new ones.
For example, every provider has a retention, or as some people call it, the loyalty department. It’s essentially the last resort to keeping the customer and it’s job is to try to match the offers of their competitors.
Now generally speaking, billing issues arise from the salesman not setting 100% right expectations. I believe being fully transparent with the customer is more important than anything else and is in fact appreciated, rather than frowned upon. Even if you miss mentioning a tiny detail, it will lead to larger problems later down the road and could even result in the customer leaving the service altogether.
In many cases, customers have had to stay on hold for 45 minutes to an hour just to speak to a representative who will help them with a small problem. We value nothing more in this world than time, since it is synonymous with money. Hence, the quicker the problem is solved, the happier the customer. Unfortunately, that doesn’t happen in a lot of cases which leads to negative reviews on the company’s website and some people take it to an extreme, like writing a complaint email to the CEO.
The disastrous system outage
Last year, rogers communications underwent a catastrophic system outage causing customers to express their frustration on social media. Countless people’s businesses, health, and relationships were negatively affected. Rogers later revealed the reason for the outage in an article published on CBC News:
We have identified the root cause of the service issues and pinpointed a recent Ericsson software update that affected a piece of equipment in the central part of our wireless network. That led to intermittent congestion and service impacts for many customers across the country.”
It is no surprise that running such a massive operation of providing service to 11.3 million (which is practically a third of Canada) users doesn’t come with technical glitches once in a while. However, it does taint the reputation of the company and it’s never easy to earn back the trust of the customer.
This incident also taught people a valuable lesson: to never fully rely on one provider, so if one goes down, they can rely on the other.
Expansion of services
The three telecommunication giants in Canada; Rogers, Bell and Telus have greatly expanded their business in the last decade. For instance, Rogers and Bell have started to dominate the home security sector. Unlike Rogers and Bell, Telus however bought out ADT for $700 million to keep up with their competitors. This teaches us another important lesson in business: if you are not innovating, you are losing.
The emergence of 5g
Launched in June of 2020, 5g network is a new advancement in telecom which allows users to experience faster internet speed and lower lag time in communications between servers. Currently, this technology is offered by the three main giants: Rogers, Bell, and Telus Communication.
While 5g is great for regular everyday people like you and me, it can also increase productivity in offices, accelerate production in warehouses, assist children in schools and improve common people’s lives in a massive way.
Final thoughts
In my humble opinion and estimation, the telecom industry is not only essential in Canada but also worldwide. It won’t be accurate to say it’s flawless, as, at the end of the day, every industry wants to make money but there is always room for improvement, like raising customer service standards, minimizing the probability of technical glitches happening, training the employees better, etc.
But the advent of AI, machine learning and all that fun stuff will definitely bring further automation and innovative solutions to telecom. And who knows, maybe smartphones will become obsolete, and we’ll be talking to each other on giant smartwatches (not the ones we have right now), but some other sci-fi movie material, as remarkable as your imagination. Future looks bright folks!
