Providing an omnichannel customer experience, with consistency across channels, is now a minimum expectation on the part of customers for any type of service.

Which is why Sky in the UK adopted a catalog-driven approach for their new product creation and customer sales processes, relying on legacy billing and provisioning for the backend.  Sky can now rapidly create and launch new products and services knowing that they can quickly sell them through their different channels and subsequently deliver them to their customers to readily access inside and outside of the home. Sky see this capability as a measureable competitive advantage in the highly competitive UK market.

The technology underpinning this functionality is cloud-deployable, data and work-flow driven, emphasizing configuration over any customization. It provides real-time, up-to-date knowledge of all the parameters and constraints for what is available to customers through any channel. This support spans the sales, offer configuration, pricing, quoting and order capture processes.  The result? The customer can immediately see exactly which offers are available (and thereby eligible and feasible), easily choose their personalized options, and quickly receive their products and services.

Using the same technology, Orange in Belgium successfully implemented a seamless customer selling and buying experience using real-time product configuration, price and quote capabilities, which ensured accuracy and alignment across all channels.  It is this understanding of the order creation and flow-through process that was essential in aligning the offer, pricing and delivery of products to the customer.

Utilizing über-orchestration to connect the new world with legacy

As new channels are launched and next generation networks, such as 5G and NFV/SDN, are introduced, service providers need a mechanism for maintaining the automated flow-through between all of the points of customer sales and product / service delivery.

The ability to orchestrate the fulfilment of an order from multiple channels, across different delivery networks, and into the full B/OSS stack requires an über orchestration platform. Essentially, an order management function capable of sitting across new and legacy infrastructure to ensure accurate order acceptance, validation, decomposition and delivery management. Of course, the agility of such a platform is dependent upon its catalog-driven, workflow enabled architecture.

Windstream in the US knew that the success of its far-reaching transformation program for digitalized product and service delivery was dependent upon such a capability. To solve the key pain points affecting their customers’ experience – disconnected swivel-chair systems, inaccurate product catalog, fragmented, slow, and inaccurate manual processes, order inaccuracy, lengthy time to installation, custom code to adopt to change – they needed a catalog that could drive operations, a sales, quote and order capture solution that could operate consistently across any channel, and an order management platform that could orchestrate delivery across the end-to-end modern and legacy infrastructure.

A new era of innovation – catalog-driven, agile B/OSS

To deliver on a digital transformation, operators must embrace digital innovation and enable rapid launch and fulfilment of new products and services by adopting a catalog-driven, agile B/OSS overlay to their legacy systems. 

Adopting a catalog-driven, agile B/OSS approach is about gaining the ability to quickly execute different business models over the technology CSPs are deploying today, without having to completely replace legacy systems.

The digitalization of the CSP is more than redefining and hard-coding new products or services in isolation. It is about changing business operations, based on a thorough understanding of customer needs, behaviour and experience. Catalog-driven agile B/OSS is the fastest path to creating, selling and delivering digital products and services and is the future for communications providers seeking to become market leading digital service providers.