By: Tiago Lopes

As the needs and expectations of users continue to change, communications services providers (CSPs) are on a continuous journey of evolving and upgrading their digital channels. Customers now expect seamless, personalized, omnichannel experiences, requiring CSPs to modernize both their back-end systems and their frontline digital touchpoints to keep pace.

However, many CSPs are constrained by their legacy BSS/OSS platforms and find it difficult to compose and deploy new digital experiences at speed. Agility remains a significant challenge for CSPs striving to support advanced digital strategies and manage exponential growth through digital sales, enhanced customer interaction, and digitalized transactions.

To overcome these challenges and future-proof their digital customer experiences, forward-thinking CSPs are embracing more agile, composable approaches to modernizing their BSS/OSS foundations.

Bringing the Digital Strategy to Life

CSPs require e-commerce and self-care journeys to be available across mobile and web applications so customers can manage all aspects of their account and services through digital channels without the need for phone calls or in-person visits. Customers are happy to use digital channels when:

• They can complete their tasks independently.
• Learning how to do what is required is intuitive and easy.
• The user journeys are reliable and flawless.

Providing these self-service capabilities empowers customers to take control, improving satisfaction and reducing the load on call centers and retail locations. It also enables CSPs to boost digital sales and transactions, which are more cost-effective than traditional channels.

However, each of these user journeys must be designed and crafted in detail. CSPs that try to cover too many use cases via their digital channels, often end up compromising on the user experience of them all. An engaging digital channel is characterized by its quality and ease of use, not by the ability to do everything. So, when launching a digital channel, focus on a limited number of high-value experiences and run the complete lifecycle of user-centric design, from research to user testing.

Registration and onboarding of new customers is particularly delicate, as CSPs have a unique opportunity to portray an image of trust, simplicity, and customer focus. A challenging onboarding experience is likely to take a long time to fade from the customer’s memory, so removing friction early on is crucial.

It is always interesting to judge the quality of a product by the amount of time that a customer spends using it; users are willing to invest their time when something is useful and intuitive.

Divide and Conquer: Measuring Your Digital Success

The ability to measure digital engagement is the base KPI required by CSPs to support a digital strategy. Having a simple measure of the number of customers that use a digital channel at least once a month gives a strong reference about their digital maturity and can be used as a starting point from which to grow their digital business by taking specific actions to increase the utilization of digital channels. Your digital engagement KPI is simply the number of customers that use digital channels at least once a month divided by your total number of customers.

Once a high level of digital engagement has been achieved, it’s time to begin monetizing your digital strategy.

Measuring the revenue that comes from digital sales provides the next KPI. Your digital revenue equals your direct revenue from sales using digital channels divided by total revenue. Note that direct revenue from sales includes recurring revenues, so when a customer subscribes to a product that is paid via digital channels, it also contributes to this KPI. This is a strong indication of the ability to expand the business via digital marketing and sales, accommodating the growing digital-first culture of customers and efficiently monetizing CSPs’ product offerings.

New BSS/OSS capabilities can further boost CSP profit margins and provide the ability to grow exponentially through fully digitalized transactions — customer tasks that are started and completed end-to-end via digital channels and process automation,