What It Means to Have Unified Service Experience
Create a Culture of Innovation. Encourage risk-taking. First, employees need roots and wings. They need to feel secure to bring new ideas (especially outside-the-box ideas) to the table. If you want new, innovative thinking, drive your creative teams to have accountability for the organization’s objectives. They need to have openness of responsibility for key focus areas, core capabilities, and commitments to stakeholders. Then you want to ensure they have your trust by giving them broad discretion to conduct their work in service of those parameters.
If your teams are spending too much time obsessing about budget and deadlines, your ideas will wither before they have a chance to take root. Innovation and creativity will require allowance for your innovative people to bypass barriers as well as hierarchies. It will require institutional humility. When your employees stop failing, you will know that you have completely squelched all innovation from your teams. The art and understanding of what is possible can bring incredible ideas to the table.
Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional. Expect some pain. As Buddhists are known to say; “If you can do something about it, no need to worry. If you can’t do anything about it, why worry?” Focus on, and listen to, your customers more than your competition. Suffering arises when you buy into the false belief that your pain is permanent. It’s time to attack your problems as a company. It may be a painful process to transform your business, but if you don’t you will only prolong the suffering.
Think big, act small. Think at least three, five and 10 years ahead, but plan and work on 90-day projects. Start with projects you know will be successful and will have high impact in order to gain momentum. There doesn’t need to be an intricate three-year plan that takes 6-12 months to strategize and budget. Keep your horizon and your focus on the short-term—six months or so—and realize that you don’t need to replace what you have in order to differentiate in the market. Consider keeping the legacy systems you have and focus on processes and workflow, operations automation, and product enablement at the click of a button for your users. In this fast-paced world, it is important to find quick wins and drive continued buy-in and demand. Learn, evolve, rinse and repeat.
The impact is coming
5G is right around the corner, and CSPs have delayed their decisions for so long that they will not be ready for the coming explosion. As an added bonus, implementing the above capabilities will only enhance your profitability in the meantime. We were seeing it as 2019 ended and in early 2020: a few bankruptcies here, additional selloffs, and M&A as some providers have struggled to keep up. Some of this is expected as organizations adjust to become more efficient, which means spending less time on fewer people and less of your resources on provisioning and managing customer services.
All of the recommendations discussed here will greatly enhance your customer experience, but it is important to also understand that all of these steps will prepare your organization for the advent of 5G and the impact of the IoT.
