Bridging The Customer Dissatisfaction Gap In Telecoms

Despite billions invested in infrastructure and innovation, telecoms continue to trail behind other industries in customer satisfaction. The root issue? A persistent customer dissatisfaction gap – a widening divide between what telcos deliver and what customers increasingly expect in today’s fast-evolving digital landscape (see Figure).

At the heart of the problem lies cultural and operational inertia. Many telcos still operate with a traditional, engineering-centric mindset and rely on waterfall development approaches. While once effective, these methods are ill-suited for today’s dynamic, software-driven world where agile, iterative, and customer-centric innovation is the norm.

The Reasons For Customer Dissatisfaction Are Multi-Layered

As a result, innovation cycles in telecom are slower, and the customer experience is often an afterthought, rather than a central design principle. A consistently low Net Promoter Score (NPS) reflects this customer disconnect. While sectors like hospitality, banking, and grocery retail average NPS scores in the low-to-mid 40s, telecommunications lingers at the bottom with an average of just 31. In stark contrast, exceptions like Arelion, which boasts an NPS of 70, prove that high customer satisfaction in telecom is possible—just not yet the norm.

Why are telco customers dissatisfied? The reasons are multi-layered:

• Siloed internal structures make customer-centric collaboration difficult.
• Customer frustration with service reliability and perceived value.
• Opaque or complex contracts and limited support options.
• A general wariness, sometimes resistance, to risk and experimentation.
• The difficulty of integrating advanced digital solutions with outdated legacy systems.

Future Telcos Must Become Much More Customer-Focused

My research seeks to address not why this is happening but how it can be fixed. The opportunity lies in embracing human-centric design at every stage of the customer lifecycle, from acquisition and onboarding to support and retention. Hence, move beyond technical excellence to design experiences that are intuitive, empathetic, and responsive to changing needs.

In a forthcoming series of reports which will be published as part of the SITSI programme, I will explore the technical, operational, and cultural shifts needed to narrow this customer dissatisfaction gap. From agile transformation and organizational redesign to customer journey mapping and service simplification, the goal is to help telcos compete not just on speed or coverage, but on experience.

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Please contact me (d.bieler@pacanalyst.com) if you want to discuss any of these themes or contribute to the research.