An ideal solution to accelerate customer-centric network transformation for service providers is a comprehensive platform that integrates seamlessly with standard APIs, much like Acumen360. Such a platform acts as both a foundation and a framework, expediting the shift towards customer-focused network services. It eliminates the extensive time traditionally needed for integrating various systems and solutions to create unique customer journeys. With a solution like Acumen360, time to transformation and deployment can be shortened by as much as 12 months, allowing service providers to swiftly reap the business and customer experience (CX) benefits. Using a singular, integrated platform approach for enterprise self-service that unites silos and systems also sets the stage for further advanced automation.

Laying the Foundation for AI

Intelligent automation has already been shown to make a significant impact, reducing missed appointments and payments by as much as 75 percent, calls by up to 50 percent, and time to payment by up to 60 percent. This should be enough of an incentive to start transformation with a customer-centric digital experience platform. But to unlock advanced automation, data from customer, network, product, and relevant business systems must be aggregated into a single source of truth. Once a unified platform is in place, it unlocks limitless potential for future automation.

Generative AI can be used to help enterprise customers deliver more personalized and effective customer communications by leveraging machine learning (ML) to understand patterns, relationships, and performance between networks, services, and human-customer behavior. AI can also be used to analyze predictive network and bandwidth usage patterns for more timely communications, proactive network capacity planning, software-defined network use cases, and to enable autonomous networks. Generative AI can then be used to generate effective new content that resonates with customers. There are limitless possibilities as AI, ML, and generative AI use cases continue to gain momentum, but it must begin with a centralized customer-centric platform.

AI may be the single most transformative shift in modern times. What was once science fiction quickly became a reality with the advent and mass adoption of generative AI solutions like ChatGPT, CoPilot, Gemeni, and a cornucopia of other AI applications. Advanced, intelligent automation has become a tangible reality today and it is quickly becoming a business imperative. The benefits of real-time, around-the-cloud automation and personalization are simply too great to ignore and those that embrace this innovation will thrive, while those that don’t simply won’t survive. 

Failing to Act Means Failing

We’ve seen over the last decade what happens when service providers fail to act. They lose value and relevancy in today’s highly competitive digital marketplace. Telecom networks and services are no longer unique, and CX has become a distinct differentiator. Network service providers must transform to shift into a click-to-deliver, self-service mindset simply to stem the bleeding caused by poor CX and churn. Then they can begin to thrive, innovate, and grow. The cultural shift required for such a transformation is already underway and there is no better time to start than now.

Business benefits such as increased efficiency, lower costs, better allocation of human resources, and the acceleration of new revenue streams, should be incentive enough to embrace transformation. And the long-term implications are that you will find you have both more and happier customers, which will continue to pay bountiful dividends over time. You may then be surprised to realize all that you can do to innovate and differentiate on top of the strong foundation you’ve set in place.