Simplifying the path to digital customer experience

With customers achieving more presence, power and choice than ever before, time is clearly of the essence for CSPs wishing to capture new revenue opportunities and meet the needs of their customers in the digital marketplace. Customers today have come to expect their service experience to be top class across the board and frequent online interactions and full control over their services have been key to the success of CSPs who have been instrumental in shaping the digital needs and expectations of customers.

Similar to OTT and digital service providers’ business models, CSPs need to take a different approach to their transformation strategy and begin the process of embedding agile and digital capabilities into the heart of their business processes.

The commercial migration approach that tends to be most successful is to devise smaller agile projects that deliver end-to-end capabilities to minimise the level of integration required between systems and to focus on delivering new commercial offers and products to the market, quickly and effectively. The first step involves understanding the core processes that make a business tick, as well as consolidating these processes into a pre-integrated approach to drive major economic and time to market gains for new services.

By examining the required end-to-end capabilities and implementing fit-for-purpose product functionality, CSPs can allow for fast and economical implementation and in the long run, will benefit from reduced project transformation risk, a simpler systems environment and lower TCO.

From a business perspective, by simplifying end-to-end capabilities, from day one CSPs will be able to create new bundled offerings, capture new customers, charge and bill for the services consumed, as well as allow their customers to manage their own services themselves; For example, by providing a care team to offer a one stop shop service to all their customers. Furthermore, through assessing BSS capabilities needs from a business angle, CSPs can plot a more adaptive and iterative approach to guide future actions based on their transformation needs. Using this commercial migration approach will enable CSPs to elevate IT and business teams to move their focus from low value, tactical day-to-day operations, to driving business leadership that focuses on innovation, service differentiation, customer experience and support for streamlined operations.

The range of new digital services enabled by new technologies including LTE, alongside the proliferation of data-centric devices means that the range of products and offers that need to be created and delivered quickly to the market has intensified. To exploit the abundance of new digital market opportunities available, CSPS will need to re-assess their business priorities to ensure that they build a BSS environment that can quickly support critical business change, new monetisation models and new customer digital experiences - at a lower cost of ownership. However, standard and lengthy IT led approaches to BSS projects, which focus heavily on feature parity in a modern system, fail to deliver a target business environment with the right set of priorities needed to build and gain a competitive advantage.

Starting from the needs of the business, and not IT, CSPs will need to analyse their existing business processes to determine if they are still fit for purpose in a digital world. This will require them to rethink how to strategically run their business, while creating and delivering products that can innovate rapidly to better service their customers. To simplify business processes effectively and match them to digital services capabilities, it is critical that CSPs consider IT and business architectures, systems and pricing flexibility, and assess the level of convergence and sophistication required to provide straight-forward management of their digital value chain. Through the adoption of pre-integrated solutions, businesses will be able to reduce complexity and reduce deployment timelines with ease, while improving ROI; thus reducing project transformation risks and creating a lean and efficient modern CSP operation.