With an end goal of increasing efficiency and productivity, telecom service providers can also begin laying the foundation for automation with artificial intelligence (AI)—a point I’ll touch on in more detail below. But, when you focus on making incremental improvements and enhancements to existing systems with a unified service experience platform, you’re always able to scale. Not only does this approach minimize digital transformation disruption, but it ensures a faster and more cost-effective digital transformation process.  

Empowering Employees and Enhancing Productivity  

Change management is often the most challenging aspect of digital transformation. A poorly executed transformation initiative can result in lower morale, disengaged employees, and higher resignation rates. During a digital transformation initiative, employees often don’t want to let go of systems they’ve used for years and learn a new system from scratch. Yet, they’re the ones who must invest the significant effort toward bringing new systems online. This creates a negative employee experience and reduces productivity, which is the exact opposite of what transformation projects should achieve. Instead, the goal should be to provide employees with better tools that make their jobs more efficient and enjoyable.  

This approach begins with consolidating multiple, disparate systems into a unified service experience platform, eliminating the need for employees to log into multiple systems to search for information or to complete routine and repeatable tasks. It eliminates the need to search, dig, and click through old, archaic systems. Instead, a unified service experience platform aggregates customer, product, network, service, and system information into a single source of truth. And it makes it personal for individual roles through the organization, and can be provided to end customers for self-service. It sets up rules that will give customer service, sales, and finance everything they need on a clean, state-of-the-art platform. It also provides them with a set of intelligent, next-generation tools that can recognize and suggest improvements to workflows, timing, processes, and tasks, while automating actions across silos. 

The EX is also integral to enhancing the customer experience (CX) and optimizing operations. Happy employees make for happy customers. When employees see that the goal of digital transformation is to provide them with simplified, consolidated tools that will decrease their workload, simplify their daily tasks, and improve their job satisfaction, getting their buy-in is much easier. The organization benefits through boosted productivity and a variety of morale-related advantages when employees experience more direct benefits instead of disruption during digital transformation initiatives. 

Laying the Foundation for intelligent and AI Automation

Virtually every organization is experiencing exponential data growth, and managing it can be difficult. Simply having more data doesn’t equate to better decision-making. In fact, if data is managed in disparate systems, different formats, and needs human intervention, it can create far more problems than it solves. Employees may not trust it or use it, or use erroneous data creating order fallout.  

To get the most value out of data and create operational agility, telecom service providers should strive to implement intelligent, AI-based automation that integrates disparate data sources and automates repeatable tasks across the organization. Integrating functions like Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Catalogue-Price-Quote (CPQ), Operational Support Systems (OSS), and Business Support Systems (BSS) with AI accelerates revenues, decreases costs, and increases the overall quality of products and services.

AI can also analyze data, identify data inconsistencies, ensure data uniformity and reliability, and clean data contained within legacy systems. It can automate processes such as lead-to-quote management, order fulfillment, service delivery, and more. A unified service experience platform lays the foundation for intelligent automation, as both an integrated overlay to existing  systems and the single source of truth. It’s also the fastest path to transformation, as telecom service providers can keep their existing systems in place and minimize digital disruption at the same time. By embracing automation and intelligent systems, telecom service providers can optimize