IN ASSOCIATION WITH AMDOCS
Introduction
For communications service providers (CSPs), the growth of the digital economy has coincided with an era of declining revenues from traditional sources such as voice and messaging. Competition from new players and higher customer expectations are driving CSPs to look for ways to exploit the wider digital economy by using their existing assets and experience. Luckily, the marketplace open to CSPs has never been greater in terms of available technologies. These include IoT, Wi-Fi, M2M, telematics and many others. Nor have there been more market opportunities. The development of new technologies has led to demand in areas such as digital healthcare, enterprise mobile services, asset management and of course cloud-based services, to name but a few.
The opportunity
One of the most promising of ways for CSPs to exploit the digital economy is to establish themselves as the enablers of the new digital marketplace and not just providers of the physical infrastructure over which it runs. To achieve this position, CSPs must offer businesses of all sizes and in all segments of the digital economy the necessary tools and operational support to engage with their customers and fully meet their needs and expectations.
Primarily, CSPs must offer enterprises the ability to understand the journeys their customers make across the process landscape and make those journeys seamless. Whether it’s a click-and-collect service or a direct purchase from an on-line retailer or something far more complex such as contract renewal or meeting SLAs, CSPs must offer an omni-channel experience which is both consistent and customizable. In order to offer such functionality however, CSPs must first understand the needs of enterprises both large and small across all sales channels and technologies.
What do enterprises want?
Looking at the wide variety of companies that are entering, or have already entered the digital marketplace, their priorities are clear. They are essentially enterprises which require a secure communications network over which to conduct their business. They also require a software platform which offers them complete visibility and control over their business processes. For any company, large or small, it is vital they have the ability to see in real time across the whole of their network if their customers are for example making or changing an order, are due to be billed or are in receipt of delivery and so on. This is customer engagement at its most effective.
What CSPs don’t have
However, many IT systems currently in use by most CSP’s to address the B2B market suffer from a number of drawbacks, most notably the requirement for human intervention and the lack of visibility into various business processes. For example, current platforms do not contain standardised modules for businesses wishing to introduce new offers. This means every time a business wants to launch a new product or service, a degree of reconfiguration needs to be done in the back office – something which enterprise customers can’t or don’t want to do. In addition, human intervention is required when generating proposals and offers as well as order capture and submission for both new and existing customers. Poor visibility into the order delivery process from both the point of view of the customer and the employee can lead to high order fall-out, particularly when dealing with interdependent orders, but it can also prolong delivery times and lead to poor SLA performance. Poor process visibility can also mean missed opportunities for contract renewal and long delays in monetising services that customers may want to add to existing agreements. All of this is potentially bad news for CSPs looking to exploit the digital marketplace.
What CSPs do have
CSPs do have a number of assets they can utilise however. Not the least of which is their networks. For even a small company with a single retail outlet or indeed a purely online trader, the benefits of a fast, secure network covering a multitude of bearer technologies are already becoming clear. New technologies such as IoT, which are still largely nascent from a commercial point of view, should not present much of a technical challenge to CSPs. Essentially, it is just another technology like Wi-Fi. That said, private network operators do appear to have a head start with a business case for IoT. At the very least however, traditional CSPs have a strong claim in that market as an ultimate fall-back option for widely distributed IoT networks.
Most importantly however, CSPs have in most cases a long tradition of customer experience and engagement to call upon, particularly in the mobile arena where competition for new and existing customers has been fierce for a number of years. They also have more experience than most other enterprises of developing and rolling out new revenue-generating services. In order to make use of these advantages and broaden their offerings, CSPs will require a new order of back-office systems which are already beginning to appear in the marketplace. These feature end-to-end visibility over both network and process and offer the enterprise new features such reduced sales cycles by utilising catalogue-driven guided selling and reusable BSS and OSS modules for implementing complex B2B products and services.
Conclusion
B2B presents a golden opportunity for CSPs but they need to establish an effective customer engagement model that they can take to the digital marketplace. In order for them to do this, telco IT suppliers must rise to the challenge of supplying CSPs with seamless, end-to-end B2B solutions designed for the new digital era, but built on past experience. These solutions must also take into account that the digital marketplace will continue to expand in both scope and complexity for the foreseeable future and should have built-in flexibility to meet future challenges. Such solutions are already appearing in the market and CSPs would do well to invest in them at the earliest opportunity.
In order to examine in greater depth how CSPs can effectively deal with their SMB and enterprise customers who may be part of the IoT landscape, the next three issues of VanillaPlus will feature follow-up articles focusing on sales experience, ordering experience and care experience between CSPs and their enterprise customers.
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