Putting the pieces together

A DSP cannot hope to own all the applications and content its customers might want to access and they shouldn’t. Customer demands change constantly and the only way to keep up is to automate the steps, open the interfaces and use the cloud to evaluate, accept, decline, on-board, off-board, evaluate and pay partners. A partner platform that operates in the cloud (or even as a service) can automatically and rapidly evaluate, certify, on-board, off-board and manage settlements for thousands of unique partners and their products.

DSPs that want to monetize partner offerings need to act as brokers to cloud products and services from providers of all types and sizes. Acting as the conduit between the cloud and customers takes advantage of the existing deep relationship that DSPs have with their customers while further reinforcing their brand as a full-service provider.

Existing OSS/BSS solutions are unable to rapidly analyze the customer journey. Augmenting existing solutions with systems that learn enable DSPs to implement recommendation engines, sentiment analysis, customer analytics and social media analytics. No two customers are the same, but there are patterns and persistent actions that can be understood and used to recommend products that customers actually want, not just the ones they’ve already bought.

Too many times, analytics present customers with more of the same – the same video, a hotel in the city visited last week, a good deal on something that was bought yesterday – and don’t learn that a purchase has been made and it is time to move on.

To genuinely serve customers, DSPs have to be able to keep up with their actions and transactions. What do they search for? What do they decide on? What do they actually pay for? As the volume and variety of service elements increases exponentially, customers are faced with too many choices. It is widely reported that there are more than 2 million apps in Google Play store and more than 2 billion in the Apple App Store. Merely making those storefronts available isn’t going to generate revenue.

Mastering the Digital Supply Chain

To help customers navigate through the miasma, CRM tools have to evolve beyond recommendation engines that are based on static product rules. By tracking what customers are doing and regularly evaluating social and media transactions, DSPs can dynamically model new services, bundles and offers that are then pushed out to customers or made more broadly available as short term promotions. For example, 3,000 of your customers tried a new game based on an on-line advertising campaign. Using those same channels, a DSP can offer those customers a discounted subscription to the game that is automatically bundled and billed with their mobile service. No extra logins or configurations, just click “OK”.

Orchestrating all of the sources, products, customers, infrastructure and revenue across multiple channels and providers requires a rigid process and open everything. While the DSP will not own every link of the chain, they will be held responsible if something fails. Visibility into the digital customer journey helps to understand what is working, what isn’t and where the customer experience is being adversely affected.

Whether the focus is content or enterprise IT services, DSPs are the enablers and the digital supply chain makes that possible. Acting as the conduit between partners and customers, DSPs are obligated to monitor every transaction and every element that makes up the end-to-end delivery of that service.

But data is no good if you can’t use it.