Teresa Cottam doesn’t mince words. The Chief Analyst at Omnisperience has spent her career watching the telecommunications industry make the same mistakes repeatedly, and she’s had enough of polite analysis that avoids uncomfortable truths.
“I’m not supposed to keep people happy. I’m supposed to actually provoke, say the things that other people won’t say,” Cottam says.
“If analysts aren’t provocateurs, if we don’t say ‘That’s a load of crap’ when we see it, who is going to say it? That’s our whole role, really.”
Her new book “Telecoms Customer 2035” is a wake-up call to an industry she believes is sleepwalking toward irrelevance, but also offers some reasons for renewed optimism.
Plus ca Change…
What began as a modest 78-page project ballooned into 240 pages as Cottam uncovered the scale of the problem. “I thought, I’ll write a book about the customer, and then when I started, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a much bigger problem.’”
At the heart of Cottam’s thesis is a simple but damning assessment:
“We’re great at running networks. We’re brilliant at it, but we’re terrible at running businesses. We’re awful at dealing with our customers. It’s been bad my entire career, and every single year we’ve been saying ‘You need to get better, you need to get better. Maybe you could do this? Why don’t you do that?’ And telcos just haven’t got better. They’re terrible, they’re still terrible.”
The consequences are existential. “Unless we fix this problem, we might as well just pack up and go home, because all the operators are going to go bankrupt. The networks will still exist, but they’ll get bought up by big companies and these individual operators, they’re doomed.”
The Wrong Core
While customers are, unsurprisingly, the key source of telecoms revenues, they tend to be an afterthought to business leaders, falling somewhere after technology upgrades or cost management. Cottam conducted an analysis of core values from 40 large telecoms operators worldwide, examining their annual reports and websites. Her conclusion?
“Most of them are utter bullshit. They don’t talk about improving the relationship with the customer, or it’s all vagaries. Nothing’s actually deliverable.”
Additionally, she found that very few employees actually know or practice these stated values. “It’s just marketing bullshit. It’s more of this shiny suit that we put on, where we pretend that we’re one thing when we’re actually another.”
The disconnect between telecoms marketing – to ourselves and to users – and reality is stark. “They show these fancy people walking around in London all having a superb lifestyle with these really expensive handsets, doing video calls. The reality is you can’t even get connectivity in rural Lancashire. There’s a total dissociation between what they pretend that they are doing versus the lived experience for many people.”
Many in the industry see artificial intelligence as a silver bullet to reinvigorate the business. Cottam is having none of it.
“Do you remember that old saying? If you automate a bad process, you just get a faster bad process. That’s exactly what we’re doing. AI can’t solve all our problems. It can make things faster. It can do lots of things. It’s a great technology, but if we don’t know what we want to do in the first place, how can we expect AI to fix the problem?”
Having said that, underestimating AI’s impact is a problem. She argues that ChatGPT’s arrival fundamentally changed everything – not so much for business operations, but for the business relationship with customers.
“Literally everything that happened before three years ago, you can forget about. When ChatGPT broke onto the scene, it obsoleted everything. It obsoleted every forecast that every analyst firm has put out. It obsoleted every strategy that you put together.” Yet the industry’s response has been inadequate. “They’re just carrying on like, ‘We can just make things a bit faster and that’ll be great’. But it won’t.”
The book’s premise is blunt: “In 2035 we’re going to be in a very different world, and instead of looking at what the world was like 20 years ago and trying to incrementally improve on the situation of 20 years ago, we need to reimagine ourselves as a business and reimagine our relationship with our customer.”
Time is running out. “I think 2026 is going to be really pivotal, because it’s the year when we decide we’re going to change or we sign our own death warrants. We don’t have any time.”
Something to shout about
Cottam’s book isn’t a litany of failures. It also presents a compelling opportunity: “next-generation voice”. With a master’s degree in English language and linguistics specialising in oral communication, Cottam sees a fundamental shift coming in how people interact with technology.
“Typing is not normal. I mean, we learn to speak before we do anything else. It’s the most fundamental way of communicating. The written word excludes because people have problems with it, because it’s a skill you have to learn. Very few people have problems speaking.”
As AI-powered voice interfaces become more ubiquitous in smart homes, smart cars, and smart environments the question arises: “Who is going to be the interface to the smart world of the future? That is the battle.”
Telecoms operators are uniquely positioned to win this battle, Cottam argues. “The telco’s core business is voice. It’s been doing voice since Victorian times. It invented voice, right? It gets it.”
What’s more, operators have something Big Tech doesn’t: trust, at least potentially. “If you talk to the average person in the street, do they want Elon Musk dominating the world of voice? No, they don’t. They don’t trust him. We are much more trusted.”
This is particularly true in emerging markets, where the telco is often also the brand people are conducting financial transactions through. If the hyperscalers are not sufficiently trusted, the personal AI assistant of the future won’t be a retailer’s tool, either.
“You don’t want a Tesco’s chatbot that follows you around and tries to sell you chocolate and sausages every 5 minutes. You don’t trust Tesco’s enough to do that. You might want to have the Tesco’s AI interface with your personal AI so that you can order your shopping very easily. But who is going to own your personal AI?”
Cottam argues telecoms could and should own this relationship, particularly taking into account the national interest dimension.
“If this is some third party, for-profit American company, you’re going to get into a whole load of issues to do with ethics and control. If it’s your national telco providing this, a lot of problems disappear. You could have sovereign voice. You could have sovereign AI. As a government, you have control.”
Or Get Off the Pot
The stakes are enormous and stretch to every consumer and business in the world. “Voice 2.0. This is AI voice. This is something completely different from making phone calls and this is going to revolutionise technology. If we can get that bit right, we can unlock trillions.”
Cottam’s message to the industry is uncompromising. The old ways of thinking, with 30-year-old processes, outdated KPIs, and incremental improvements, won’t do. “We have a senior management team in many operators that doesn’t have any ideas and that just keeps thinking, ‘If we do things a little bit better that will be fine,’ rather than actually reimagining what we’re doing. We are failed by our senior management in this industry.”
Despite her harsh critique, Cottam believes change is possible, if operators act now. “We could turn this around with a bit of honesty, a bit of humility and refocusing on our customers; and actually harnessing what we do have to deliver against a true purpose.”
The question is whether the industry will listen before it’s too late. As Cottam puts it: “I want to start the conversation by saying we’re not serving our customers properly and that’s the first thing that we need to fix. It’s like the Gordian knot. Where do you start pulling at it?”
For Teresa Cottam, the answer is simple. Start with reinventing how telco voice relates to your customers, start now, or don’t bother starting at all.
Note – this isn’t an advert and it’s not paid for, but the ideas are certainly a different take on improving the industry. If you like the ideas here you can read more, and/or get the book, on the Omnisperience website
