“Competition has become so fierce that CSP’s understanding of the customer, their needs and issues they may be experiencing, and being able to personalize the way they are addressed is key to becoming a competitive differentiator. As a result, CRM and the way in which operators interact with their customers is becoming mission critical,” adds Järtby.

Ericsson has found itself in a unique position to capitalize on this trend and it has built a CRM solution that is integrated with its OSS/BSS stack designed to equip CSP’s customer facing channels with a 3-dimensional view of their customer to optimize the customer’s interaction experience. The combined strength of its Innovation Framework provides CSPs with the ability to rapidly create and introduce new and innovative services that are personalized according to the customer’s experience, supporting the company’s Agile Operator strategy.

With CRM, Ericsson can centralize the information from the OSS, BSS, third party sources and the network and make it available in real-time to customer care, sales and marketing.

“The ability to control the network has been underutilized by operators,” continues Järtby. “But it’s their most valuable asset.”

Combining real-time insights from network experience analytics, with customer information from the billing and customer management systems along with a single comprehensive product view in real-time, opens a new realm of possibilities. Take, for example, a CSP who wants to offer real-time, on-demand quality of service (QoS) upgrades to customers using bandwidth-hungry applications. Or, how about opening up unique network capabilities to better leverage OTT development and monetize OTT applications? What about having the ability to know the quality of experience (QoE) your customers are having when they call the call center, or even before they call, so that you can tailor the response, proactively resolve issues, and offer personalized service? Sounds pretty good to us.

So much so that the Ericsson swept three categories in Pipeline’s 2014 COMET Innovation Awards program, where it won three categories including: Innovation in Support Systems, Innovation in Cloud & Virtualization, and The Most Innovative Technology Provider.

Partner for Success

While some CRM providers were still praying that some start-up was going to build something that would actually fit in a telecom environment, Microsoft was launching key partnerships with industry leaders, such as Ericsson, to build leading vertical solutions upon its Microsoft Dynamics CRM platform. Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a powerful contender in its own right – challenging the best-of-breed CRM solutions with its ubiquity, carrier-grade scale, flexibility, and extensibility with its integration with Microsoft Office, cloud, and other collaboration products and third-party information sources. With the acquisition of Yammer, Microsoft embedded intelligent enterprise networking within its CRM platform providing cross organizational collaboration. Then again in 2013, Microsoft bolstered the company’s CRM capabilities when it acquired Netbreeze, a multi-lingual social media analytics company to enhance the aggregation of data from social media networks. The Microsoft Dynamics momentum is now undeniable, and perhaps unstoppable, with more than 4 million users representing approximately 40,000 companies worldwide as of early 2013.

“Our top goal is to help our partners innovate,” Bob De Haven, General Manager of Worldwide Communications & Media at Microsoft, told Pipeline. “We want to continue to enrich our Dynamics CRM platform so companies like Ericsson can create innovative, customer-ready solutions that complement the growing capabilities of our CRM offering.” And that appeared to resonate with Ericsson, too.