- AI is dredging up telcos’ stale content — and customers are paying the price
- Bad chatbot answers could turn support savings into churn headaches
- Storyblok says the fix starts simple: clean up the content customers hit most
Back in the dark ages before AI, outdated web content didn’t die. It was instead sent off to the farm, deranked and delisted in Google search results. But out of sight no longer means out of mind. Supposedly helpful AI is resurrecting old, outdated content, and that is becoming a very big problem for consumers and enterprises alike.
A recent survey of 550 senior executives of billion-dollar-plus companies found an estimated 5.86% of annual revenue is negatively affected by poor, unclear or outdated content. The survey and subsequent study was conducted by content management software provider Storyblok.
What exactly does “affected” mean here? Well, Storyblok CEO and Co-Founder Dominik Angerer painted a picture: Imagine you’re searching for something you want to purchase on Google. If the price displayed isn’t the best in the market or is inconsistent with what consumers see on the current product page, they’ll like go elsewhere to make that purchase. That’s revenue that’s lost and it’s likely because the brand has a problem with old page content being dredged to the surface by AI.
Why do customers churn?
Angerer said this problem can show up in many different areas. Take customer service, for example, a key use case where telcos are applying AI. Angerer noted a lot of firms – telcos included – are using AI chatbots to save money on first level customer support. But a chatbot feeding on so-called “rotting content” can end up linking customers to outdated sites or serving up bad information that only frustrates them more.
“Support is one of the major things that can break” customer trust in a brand, Angerer said. “This is usually the pain where people churn because they don’t get the help that they want. And the problem is such AI agents, no matter how good they are, can only be as good as the foundation that you have.”
He added: “Right now people are living with a higher increase of churn because of AI agents. Maybe some of them are happy with the response time, but the problem is the quality of the responses that they are giving is actually going down if their content is bad.”
The same could also be said of the AI agents that are being used to help network operations teams remediate issues. If the data and content used to train the agent is outdated, the results may be subpar at best.
How are telcos coping with data?
Some telcos are tackling the problem head on. Angerer noted Storyblok worked with U.K operator Virgin Media O2 to create a modular, reusable content structure. The idea was to create a single source of truth for both web and app content. Using mix and match modules tied to that source of truth ensures that new and existing content is up to date and easy to repurpose.
Storyblok has also teamed up with Netherlands operator Odido, KPN’s MVNO brand Simyo, mobile data company Firsty and mobile roaming company BetterRoaming. Angerer said it’s also worked with a number of other operators it can’t name.
In terms of a starting point for wrangling rotting content, Angerer said the first step is simple: look for the top 10 to 20 most searched terms on your website. See where those terms lead to find and fix outdated content.
“Try to clean up your mess right now, no matter what system you have, go in there, fix the content that’s outdated, fix your most prominent sites, most prominent content pieces that you have,” he said. “Don’t get lost in all the cool things you can be doing, just fix the articles.”
Read more about data and technical debt here:
4 barriers telcos must clear to win the AI economy
The Five Nine: Telcos are drowning in data debt
Telcos need to clean up technical debt like hoarders need to clean their houses
Cisco: 'Infrastructure debt' drags down AI deployments
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