Industry
Enterprise Solutions
Enabling Enterprise Agility & Resilience with a Robust Cloud Strategy
Highlights
- Demonstrating business agility is a must for telcos to grow and thrive in this era, with customer experience as the main differentiator between companies.
- Telco transformations must optimise an intuitive user experience and proffer enterprise-wide integrations for high-quality customer experiences.
- The key to success for telcos right now is to build an agile operating model to respond to rapid business changes and go to market quickly.
ROADMAP
Amid frequent mergers and acquisitions, an evolving technology landscape, and increasing focus on experience-rich customer engagement, telcos are prioritising business value delivery.
And to deliver that, organisations require an adaptable operating model that is able to make changes, pivot business strategy, and enable faster-to-market programmes.
Telcos are propelling change from traditional business support systems (BSS) to more modern digital BSS through various digital transformation exercises. However, not all digital transformation efforts pay off. An ill-equipped transformation attempt can impact revenues, unreasonably inflate operations costs, and allow digital natives to leap ahead in market share.
Delays in telecom transformation often originate from factors, including resistance to change, low adoption of new technologies, data migration issues, and differing data quality across different systems. This results in prolonged durations without business value delivery, making it even more difficult to enhance customer experience and retain loyalty.
Challenges
Customer experience often has to take a backseat due to technical debt accrued over years and complex integrations across the ecosystem.
Exceptional customer experience in the modern age is difficult with frequent disruption, integration issues, complex product portfolios, and inadequate customer data visibility.
With the telecom space buzzing with frequent mergers and acquisitions (M&As), one of the first things (post merger) to focus on is combining the customer relationship management (CRM) functions to get rid of siloed systems – and this is not easy.
Another challenge is that operators’ product portfolios have grown exceedingly complex over time. This makes integrating business systems quite a struggle.
Further, with the huge volumes of data being generated through call detail records, server logs, network equipment, and social networks, implementing advanced and efficient data analytics is an uphill task for telecom companies. But it’s also a great opportunity for growth, if tapped correctly, tied to technological maturity.
Telcos in turn are continually asking themselves:
- How to make our digital core agile enough to enable seamless acquisitions and affect a value proposition to appeal to whitespaces in the market?
- How can we leverage composable business architecture to simplify customer journeys?
- How can we offer flexible, comprehensible plans that can be easily personalised based on customers’ changing preferences?
Approach
Why does the digital core matter for customer experience?
If the digital core of an enterprise is fragmented and unable to process data efficiently, it is impossible to create smooth and seamless customer experience. The back-end problems will often creep into front-end experiences.
Successful global organisations are solving this problem by combining highly scalable and existing cloud ERP to unify IT systems.
Some necessary improvements that are critical to agility and growth are:
- A central product catalogue that fits across multiple telco value chain components like billing, sales and support channels, and customer management
- A preconfigured industry solution to leverage modular and standardised frameworks to manage ever-expanding service telco offerings
- Cloud and infrastructure investments in artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, to modernise the technical architecture
- In our experience, launching a well-designed and fully digital core across the enterprise can yield a positive return on investment within six to nine months.
The way forward
Continuous innovation is a way of life for telcos that want to deepen customer loyalty through industry-leading customer experience.
Because large telcos follow unchartered patterns of expansion, they must innovate continuously to stay well-governed while simultaneously customising products to please customers.
Preconfigured platform solutions can enable telcos to implement strategic changes and the metrics to measure impact, stay ahead in the customer experience wars, and win the loyalty of customers.