Agility underlines CSPs’ digital aspirations
By : Gaurav Bajaj
Senior Manager - Corporate & Product Marketing
CSPs around the world are focusing on increasing customers’ wallet share by enabling services that go beyond voice and data and fit their lifestyle needs in the fast advancing digital world. To achieve this, maintaining a higher level of Customer Satisfaction is critical. However as per Mckinsey report telecom operators’ average net promoter score (NPS), a key customer-satisfaction metric, has typically been in the 20s, as against the score of 50 for many other digital powerhouses.
Digital Transformation: Opportunities and Threats
For the past few years Communication service providers are trying to transform themselves into Digital service providers, expanding their business from communications to other adjacent OTT services such as messaging, financial services, entertainment services, IoT services, etc. As per a World Economic Forum report $2+ Trillion is the value that Telcos can unlock with becoming an enabler of Digital Economy.
However, CSPs have an intense competition to battle out; not only with their rival telcos but with other OTT, Fintech and media/content service providers like Amazon, Paytm, Whatsapp, etc. As per a Juniper report 15+ % of service revenue gets eroded yearly due to migration of subscribers from operator to OTT services.
CSPs to DSPs – the incremental approach
CSPs need to embrace the fundamentals of doing digital business by focussing on improving customer experience. They need to bring in agility to their customer-centric operations and migrate many of their systems from legacy to modern cloud-ready, digital-first environment. And then invest in having a high speed network infrastructure and partner ecosystem to create compelling digital services and experiences for their customers.
This is easier said than done. Not all CSPs are going in for big bang transformation, but some of them are smartly making this transformation in incremental steps so that they can stay closer to the digital natives till they transition to fully native Digital Service Providers.
- CSPs are launching disruptive digital attacker brands like GoMo by Eir, Win by Inwi, fizz by Videotron, SMARTY by Hutchison 3G, VOXI by Vodafone UK, Visible by Verizon USA, etc. built on new digital platforms. It gives them flexibility to launch new, differentiated and more personalized offerings quickly and match the CX expectations and standards set by the digital-first enterprises like Amazons and Stripes of the world.
- CSPs are creating sub-brands or separate entities in an adjacent industry to provide specialized services like mobile finance service, content services, etc to the customers, like jio money, MTN MoMo, wynk by Airtel, etc.
Challenges and enablers for supporting CSPs Digital Play
“As per Everest Group only 27% of Digital transformation projects are a success”
Driving a digital transformation in telcos have its own set of challenges
- Excessive Complexity -A large number of complex products and plans that are hard to manage and optimize leading to delayed execution.
- Agility – Launching products & services and getting them to market in the shortest time frame and reaching out to the dynamic digital natives.
- Omni-channel journey orchestration – Delivering an always on experience across channels and staying relevant to customer’s contextual needs and interests.
- Old school legacy systems – Traditional and outdated systems and technologies that still uses siloed processes and do not support new and advanced use cases.
- Service Integration – Telcos services such as broadband, fixed-line, broadcasting, etc are treated as separate entities. With creation of more services such as IoT, mobile banking, etc will increase complexity for the telecom to consolidate these services.
Key enablers for a successful Digital Transformation
Below figure points out the key elements that the telcos should incorporate in their systems to drive a successful digital transformation
Conclusion
With rapid changes in the internet technologies and the overall telecom landscape Digital transformation has become essential for a telco to fuel their growth and stay relevant. With the right combination of technology and services Telcos have the potential to become an advanced internet technology company.
Flytxt through its AI driven solutions is focused on enabling a Telco to leverage AI, advanced analytics and marketing automation to maximize customer and product lifetime value.
For more details download our e-book on Digital transformation for Telcos.
