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Teresa Cottam, founder and Chief Analyst at Omnisperience and author of Telecoms Customer 2035, today issues a ruthless wake-up call for the telecoms industry: if telcos want to thrive in 2035, they urgently need to rethink customer relationships.
The evidence is stark. Hundreds of billions spent on 5G networks, fibre-to-the-home, digital transformation and now machine learning and AI – yet churn rates remain among the highest of any industry. Revenues have flatlined. Customers continue to vote with their feet.
Cottam is blunt: “The telecoms industry has been running the same 1990s playbook while AI has obsoleted everything – including customer expectations. You can’t keep doing the same things and expect different results. 2026 must be the year we finally get real and recentre on the customer.”
In her new book, available now on Amazon, Cottam argues that what telcos long called “loyalty” was never real. It was largely inertia.
“The bottom line is that billions spent on loyalty schemes and customer perks were not a good use of resources,” she writes. “Customers were never loyal – they were just too lazy to leave.”
With switching easier than ever and AI agents on the rise, telcos face their toughest battle yet. One of the book’s core messages is simple and brutal: stop wasting money on loyalty programmes that deliver almost nothing. With customers switching faster than ever, perks and points won’t hold them.
Trust, not loyalty, is the only sustainable edge left
But hope exists. Surviving means killing your darlings, slaughtering sacred cows and dragging comfortable but outdated assumptions into the daylight.
What keeps customers engaged – especially during the current global trust crisis – is being a trusted company. In commoditised markets, trust is now the rarest commodity and one of the few true differentiators.
The numbers speak for themselves:
87% of shoppers have paid more for a trusted brand
Trusted companies can charge 23% more on average
Cottam’s verdict: “Loyalty programmes are expensive theatre. Trust is the premium feature customers are willing to pay for. Earn it relentlessly. Guard it fiercely. Lose it once – by letting a customer down when they most need you – and they’re gone.”
Telecoms Customer 2035 exposes wrong-headed and obsolete thinking in the industry while delivering practical ideas to shift the needle.
Cottam concludes: “The telcos that thrive in 2035 will be those that understood one thing in 2026: the customer must come first, last and always.”
***ENDS***
FOR EDITORS
For interviews, review copies or speaking enquiries, contact Morgan Lewis at morgan@omnisperience.com.
The book is currently available from Amazon in paperback, and will be available in hardback and Kindle on 20 January 2026. Paperback ISBN: 9798276167473
Join out Substack for more articles, papers, arguments and thinking around the telecoms customer and early chapters of the follow-up book Building the Dialogue-Centric Telco.
About Teresa Cottam Teresa Cottam is founder and Chief Analyst at Omnisperience. A judge for the World Communication Awards and contributing analyst to TM Forum, she has spent over 30 years helping telcos and vendors escape outdated thinking and build experiences that drive real revenue.
About Omnisperience Omnisperience helps telcos put customers first, last and always.
What’s in and out in 2026?
#1 Loyalty is OUT; trust is IN
Telecoms Customer 2035: new book says AI alone won’t save telcos (and what will)
Telcos don’t have a technology problem – they have a customer problem
And until they fix the relationship, nothing else will move the needle
London, 11 December 2025 – Teresa Cottam, former senior analyst at Ovum, Informa and Analysys Mason and now Chief Analyst at Omnisperience, and author of TM Forum’s 'Humanizing AI', today announces a new book that dismantles three decades of failed orthodoxy in the telecoms industry - ‘Telecoms Customer 2035’.
Hundreds of billions spent on 5G, full fibre, cloud and generative AI have delivered flat revenues, stubbornly high churn, and customers who switch the moment a cheaper deal appears.
The real crisis in telecoms isn’t technology, pricing or business model. It’s the relationship telcos have with their customers. Cottam dismantles the myths:
- Loyalty never existed – it was inertia in disguise
- NPS is broken and actively misleads boards
- AI alone will just accelerate irrelevance, not prevent it
- The killer app of 2035 is already here – telcos just haven’t woken up to it yet.
THE WORLD IN 2035
By 2035, typing will be dead. Voice will be king (again) and personalised voice interface layers will make it far easier to interact with technology (think Scottie on the Enterprise!).
This is a huge opportunity for telcos, as they have natural advantages to dominate this business area, such as a deep heritage in voice, the global infrastructure needed to deliver it and the relationship with the customer. Cottam argues that unlocking this opportunity requires an urgent reset of customer relationships today.
“By 2035 voice will be the dominant interface,” says Cottam. “Telcos are currently the only companies that can deliver trusted, low-latency, sovereign voice at global scale. But this vast, new business only unlocks once they’ve fixed their relationship with their customers and stopped treating customer dialogue as a cost centre rather than an opportunity.”
AI ALONE WON'T SAVE TELCOS
Without a reset, automating current customer support processes by adding AI risks delivering faster bad relationships.
“Think about it. We’re approaching customer relationships with thinking straight out of the era of CD-ROMs, Nokia 1011s and VHS videos. And we wonder why we’re getting it so wrong,” Cottam says.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. There’s still time for a serious intervention to get customer relationships back on track. Telecoms Customer 2035 challenges the out-of-date thinking, outlines the new opportunities for telcos and explains how things are set to rapidly evolve with the introduction of AI.
“Without fast and significant change in the way we approach customer relationships, we’re going to miss the boat again,” Cottam warns. “This book is deliberately provocative to get everyone talking about what really matters – not 5G, 6G or even AI, but our relationship with our customers.”
TELECOMS CUSTOMERS 2035:
Paperback £24.99 | eBook £14.99
ISBN 979-8-2761-6747-3
Published 6 January 2026
#customer2035 #omnisperience