From Eve’s proclivity for apples to today’s deeply insightful “HAVE IT YOUR WAY®” Burger King® slogan, it seems there has always been a challenge meeting the demand for personal choice. The common truth is that people fundamentally want what they want, when they want it, regardless of where they are. This poses several unique challenges for operators and meeting those challenges is what separates those that thrive from those that die on the vine.
Challenge #1: Variety
Customers want choices and, even when presented with the bounty of The Garden of Eden, chances are customers will still want the apples. Customers crave “what’s next” and are willing to risk change and, quite often, pay more to get it. To operators, this means two things: 1) you will lose customers if you can’t keep up and 2) the operators who can continually provide innovative, new services will attract customers from all the operators that don’t. This has three critical and very tangible business impacts: the loss of new service revenue, loss of existing customers, and the lost opportunity of gaining new customers. To avoid these pitfalls, operators must ensure their OSS is capable of efficiently creating, delivering, and managing multiple next-generation services.
The cornerstones of personalization are preference and control.
decreased dependency upon a physical location. Homes are being equipped which residential gateways that enable multiple, fixed and mobile customer devices. Customer devices are supporting multiple access technologies, services, and are enabling advanced service applications. Other customers have abandoned fixed-line services altogether and have no dependency upon a physical location whatsoever – and the customer has become the primary, common element associated to their services. Services, and the customers’ service experience, now need to be delivered consistently, accurately,
Challenge #2: Location
Most services, even today, follow a rather antiquated service blueprint whereby the service, for all intents and purposes, “is” the service address. These roots go back as far as to the advent of the telephone and remain fairly consistent to today. This relationship was born out of an inherent dependency between the service and the physical location where the primary, quality connection resides. In many cases the physical connectivity was, in fact, the service; but that is changing today. While location is still important, seemlessly delivering services to multiple devices as the customer’s location changes is the challenge.
Today, more and more services are being liberated from their physical location and are being created independent of their underlying access technologies. Customers are leveraging multiple fixed and wireless access technologies with increased bandwidth, improved quality of service, and a
and seamlessly over any access technology to myriad of customer devices – wherever and whenever the customers wants them.
Viewing the subscriber as the center of all services opens new doors for operators. Subscriber-centric services present operators with the opportunity to leverage any and all services over any access technology – and to deliver services to the end-devices of the customer’s choice when they want them and on-demand. Next Generation Operators (NGOs) are capitalizing on this opportunity by providing a wide variety of services and creating innovative new offerings that provide customers with access to services over multiple access technologies and devices. These subscriber-centric services include advanced service features, value-added service applications, rich multimedia content, convergence, personalization, and mobility. NGOs are able to provide their customers with what they want, when and where they want it.
Pipeline
Publishing, Volume 7, Issue 2
