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By
Brian Cappellani
Telcos are debating how they will avoid being commoditized in a multi-party, content- and applications-oriented service environment. Billing and CRM vendors are dominating many of the conversations by pushing the message that telcos must become innovative service creators and personalized marketers in order to win in the end. The analytical capabilities these arguments infer will be important to drive market-of-one tactics, granular customer segmentation, and to target new services. But these capabilities only represent one part of the equation. Telcos and mobile operators have always been strongest in delivering connectivity and enabling transactions. By putting specific service management capabilities in place that enable a policy-driven service and information delivery infrastructure, they can take a critical but incremental step forward, enable smart distribution channels, and both demonstrate and bill for the business value they really provide.
Dispelling Marketing Rumors
Telcos have extensive customer management infrastructure and deep expertise in billing, but these don’t necessarily add up to marketing excellence. There’s a reason companies like Google and Amazon have had incredible success in Internet-based consumer markets and telcos have not – those Web 2.0 leaders excel at identifying consumer trends and targeting them with high quality, personalized customer experiences. Telcos and mobile operators have done well with mass market services, but the fact is that
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There’s a reason companies like Google and Amazon have had incredible success in Internet -based consumer markets and telcos have not – those Web 2.0 leaders excel at identifying consumer trends and targeting them with high quality, personalized customer experiences. |
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Telcos are in a difficult strategic position where, much like an army, they have potent yet finite resources that have to be applied in the right places to ensure success in the next decade. They have strengths in IT, but where they are strongest tends to be in engineering and networking, and applying IT resources to leverage those strengths. Telcos may not be great at satisfying individual desires yet, but they excel at maintaining communications infrastructures that help
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they aren’t great at understanding individuals and targeting them with innovative and tailored offerings. Analytics applications that help telcos to better understand their customers’ needs – consumer or enterprise – are important. But if they aren’t coupled with policy-driven operations that can act in response to the new kinds of granular market intelligence these applications may generate, telcos won’t really be able to leverage the value of the customer data they’ve mined in terms of service delivery and transaction enablement. |
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many other industries to conduct commerce nationally and globally. This will continue to be true in a content and advertising driven market as long as telcos manage to build the next layer of service fulfillment and assurance capabilities they need. Because this is a traditional area of strength, it’s a source of tangible value in this multi-party equation. Ultimately, the business intelligence capabilities they will build in parallel should help them to demonstrate the real business value of their delivery and assurance capabilities as
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