A survey of CSP respondents has revealed the extent to which the limitations of legacy technology are restricting the creation, targeting and distribution of revenue-generating digital services.
The study, carried out by BSS vendor Openet, found that while CSPs want to target customers with personalised, relevant offers in real-time in order to drive upsell opportunities, they are let down by the inflexibility of existing systems.
The survey highlighted the frustrations faced by CSPs that recognise the need for more real-time functions, better customer engagement and faster product development, but who cite a lack of BSS agility as their biggest barrier.
Although the survey of 101 CSPs found that 57% of respondents felt quite well prepared for the battle with over-the-top providers, 70% confessed they are either worse or much worse than OTTs at personalised customer engagement.
Large-scale billing transformation projects that take too long to come to fruition, and the problems of trying to adapt legacy systems to cater for digital services were cited as the largest hindrances in the move to digital. 37% of CSPs see the biggest challenge in 2016 as being the need to become more agile, reducing product lifecycles and getting more products and services to market in a shorter time period.
The survey also found that 63% of operators think it should take between one and seven days to create and send targeted and personalised offers. However, 64% admitted it actually takes up to 6 months in reality.
“These findings highlight a real mismatch between positive intentions from the operator community to leverage all the advantages of targeted, real-time offers and the technical realties of making it happen,” said Barry Marron, the global vice president of marketing at Openet. “In an age of virtualised BSS, technology need no longer be an inhibitor to digital transformation and customer centricity.”
“Operators recognise the latent value that exists in the networks they run and the data they can extract and analyse related to their customers’ behaviours,” added Marron. “This significant advantage will count for nothing however unless they use this data to create, target and monetise these digital services. This is critical virtualised BSS value-add.”
