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CSPs are looking to expand their sales into the enterprise by competing on the customer experience: a rich catalog of services, offered without errors, in a consistent and high-quality environment. To accomplish this goal, they are expanding their web portal offerings, seeking to emulate the success of other online market places.
Of course, the transition from bricks-and-mortar to online services in the retail sector has been going on for more than a decade. Amazon has nailed it, catalog companies like Lands’ End have transformed their catalogues into lucrative online storefronts...so what is to be learned from their experience?
“When we order a book from Amazon, our primary experience is in three phases: browsing the catalog, placing the order, and following the order through to its completion, and the arrival of a book on our doorstep. The telecommunications ordering process is no difference in its strategic importance”, said Susan McNeice Global Director of OSS/BSS Competitive Strategies at Stratecast. “Indeed,” says McNeice, “Stratecast believes that the telecommunications companies that can offer the highest-quality experience in these three phases are those that will reap the highest rewards, especially in the latent SMB market.”
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Tim McElgunn, Broadband Advisory Services Chief Analyst at Pike & Fisher, was able to elaborate a bit on the ongoing feeding frenzy for SMBs. “A few years ago, many analysts predicted an opportunity for the SMB sector in the dozens of billions of dollars per annum.” he told me. “Yet, today, these sales have not fully materialized. Pike & Fisher believes that back office issues have been a large part of the holdup. Cable operators, on the one hand, are familiar with mass-market sales, and have transformed their network to be able to offer sophisticated business services. The core technology is there, but remain are still gaps within their culture: functions like product design, serviceability analysis, QoS, and customer care for the enterprise remain a challenge. Fixed-line CSPs have a different problem: their back-office infrastructure is too complex and costly to allow for the price reductions necessary to attract this market effectively.”
“Be in no doubt,” added McElgunn, “downward price pressure on the SMB market will continue, with very little opportunity for growing margins from the revenue side.”
Seven Essential Ingredients to Low-Cost, High-Value SMB Service Offerings
Like online retail companies, ConceptWave uses innovative IT technology to harness Moore’s Law as we help our CSP customers to offer concierge services at “bargain basement” prices. Here are the most important elements to achieve this goal:
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Introduce a catalogue-centric order capture and fulfillment architecture. You wouldn’t stay long with an online bookseller that lacked an accurate view of which books are in the warehouse. As you introduce new offers, CSPs need to be able to both easily assemble them, as well as to ensure that they have the network capacity to offer them with full confidence of a glitch-free fulfillment. This is in contrast to the current situation at many service providers, where a highly manual and error-fraught IT process is invoked upon creation of a new offer. IT should, instead, provide the infrastructure so that the business can create the offer itself.
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