Personalised price rise journeys

Annual price rises are required across multiple industries to pay for the increasing cost to provide services or products.  The cost to maintain and power full fibre broadband infrastructure is no different but Telecoms customers typically experience significant operational and customer journey friction during these annual events. 

This friction has been seen to lead to:

• High support costs – a heavy reliance on operational resource
• Operational strain – spikes in call volume lead to higher abandonment rates
• Customer attrition – customers chose to leave 

Personalised digital journeys put the customer back in control and enable Telecoms companies to present personalised offers and communicate with customers in a way that they prefer to interact and without a dependency on people resource.

The benefits of personalised digital journeys are significant.  Our experience is that they can remove operational friction that in turn reduces call abandonment rates by over 70%, and by providing customers with pricing options tailored to their usage delivers a higher re-contract rate with over 50% also choosing to upgrade and pay more.

The price rise friction review

The core challenge at the centre of a price rise communication and journey is that the customer doesn’t want to pay more, and often this can become a trigger for those customers to look around and choose to leave.  

PrinSIX has worked with clients within the Telecoms industry and found that there can be significant operational friction due to the legacy infrastructure in place.  The customer experience then becomes compromised because during a price rise the main route for the customer to explore their options is by talking to a person in a call centre.  This in turn creates the need for companies to invest in operational resource to temporarily scale their call centre to handle the spike in volume.  

Telecoms companies have also been seen to actively put customer friction in place through complicated IVR’s and digital FAQ’s to reduce the number of inbound calls they receive and minimise this operational resource increase, but whilst limiting the operational cost this friction manifests itself in customer dissatisfaction from high abandonment rates and ultimately lost revenue when customers choose to leave.

A change in regulation from Ofcom which, after 2 years of delays due similar reasons that PrinSIX in this project, launched in 2025 saw One Touch Switch introduced.  This has achieved a lot by removing friction in the customer journey to switch providers.  Now customers who aren’t happy with a price increase and subsequent customer experience have an easy way to switch.  

PrinSIX is enabling its Telecoms clients to provide personalised digital journeys to customers during a price rise that puts their customers back in control by presenting tailored package options based on their usage and an easy way to confirm a new option.  This customer centric approach is creating higher re-contract rates, increased revenue from package upgrades and removes the need for the increased operational costs.

The PrinSIX approach

The PrinSIX platform is configurable based on the requirements of each client, with a guiding principle that each journey created aims to reduce friction and enable a business to grow.

First, the PrinSIX Analytics team worked collaboratively with the Telecoms client to map out the current digital and operational customer journeys and identify the pain points that were creating operational and customer friction.  PrinSIX Analytics identified at this stage the need for personalisation to provide a good customer outcome but had also seen a core IT dependency challenge and could understand how it had been difficult for the client to create these journeys itself.  Importantly, any solution came with a requirement to minimise the integration effort.

The scale of the operational challenge and associated investment was clear.  The forecast for customer contact wasn’t sustainable without the investment and would have resulted in poor customer outcomes through high abandonment rates.

The PrinSIX Technology team developed a solution that operated independently from the clients existing systems while allowing optional integration when IT resources were available.  PrinSIX Technology addressed the customer and operational friction points by delivering the following capabilities for the client.

• Personalised digital journeys created bespoke customer experiences based on the supplied client data and enabled over 32,000 permutations 
• Maximised digital engagement providing customers with secure personalised links reduced friction within the authentication and navigation for customers
• Minimised IT effort through automated data uploads and outputs eliminated the need for more complex system integration

The benefit

The combination of the PrinSIX Analytics and Technology approach reduced customer and operational friction within the client’s price rise journeys which created a much better customer experience and as such the commercial outcome  

• Increased re-contracting  

35% of customers who accessed the digital journey re-contracted which minimised churn and increased customer retention.

• Customer upgrades

51% of customers who re-contracted also upgraded their package driving increased revenue but also providing a further proof point of customer satisfaction with the journey.

• Reduction in call abandonment rates  

75% reduction in call abandonment rates as a significant proportion of customers were able to find a good outcome through the digital journey and it removed the need to call.

Putting customers in control  

The personalised digital journey put customers in control of creating an outcome they were happy with during a price rise process.  

A PrinSIX value is to continually iterate.  Clients benefit from the PrinSIX Analytics team continually asking if the performance of their solution could be better as they receive more data.  Customer journey clients get a regular review of the performance data within PrinSIX solutions.

51% of customers who re-contracted through the personalised digital customer journey also chose to upgrade their broadband package