In the area of 5G, there’s seems to be no ‘killer app’. Most likely, success in the area of 5G virtualised networks will depends on driving revenue from many digitally-enabled products and services.
So, it comes as no surprise that CSPs are looking at ways to diversify their offerings and access new sources of revenue to bolster their business performance. They face a series of significant challenges as markets saturate, traditional services are commoditised and the investment burden of rolling out new network technologies continues unabated. So, service providers will succeed by rapidly offering highly personalised and configurable services that can be deployed rapidly.
These services will increasingly be delivered in partnership for both consumer offerings and enterprise services, such as spinning up mobile broadband connections for remote offices, or for internet of things (IoT) applications. Some will be high value services but many will be low value, high volume propositions and the traditional approach of extensive testing, coupled with complex back office support software will be too slow, too expensive and too unattractive to suit customers’ requirements.
CSPs need to look at themselves differently to succeed in this new marketplace as agents of service personalisation and that are concerned with engagement instead of episodic customer experiences. They need to create and deliver services seamlessly, in an automated way and without error across all their channels, and the meaningfully engage with customers in order to retain them.
The create-deliver-engage approach stands in contrast to service providers who have traditionally invested in the post-sales experience through focusing on customer care and billing alongside network innovation. That created a hugely complex systems infrastructure. Now service providers need to get new revenues from customers, attract digital natives and monetise new business models. Traditional business and operational support systems have not been designed for this and cannot be force-fitted to new models.
‘Create-deliver-engage’ is about capabilities that enable innovation to be created rapidly, sold dynamically – primarily through digital channels – and sold and delivered rapidly to get it into the hands of users as soon as possible and then engaging meaningful with customers throughout their customer journey. The create-deliver-engage process is therefore the business flow that is essential for service providers to introduce not a single killer app, but hundreds, possibly thousands, of mass personalised individual apps. It’s the incremental revenues from these that will change the picture for service providers’ top and bottom lines.
The focus needs to be on managing create-deliver-engage processes effectively. Yet this is a very different set of processes to the traditional service provider business and it requires a new approach. Service providers must therefore stop trying to do more with their legacy systems and, instead, look to overlay existing systems with systems that have been specifically designed for new business models and customer engagement.
Keep it simple, retain what is good and works well, such as CRM and engagement systems, but overlay new systems to handle the create and delivery processes. This will enable service providers to harness new innovations, facilitate service creation – perhaps through open application programme interfaces (APIs) – put a friction-less sales process in place and, finally, assure the delivery of the service. The happier service providers make customers by creating a wide choice of attractive services, letting customers buy via the channels they select and ensuring service quality is maximised, the less service providers will have to do post-sales.
The more service providers get right in create-deliver-engage, the more they can focus on driving digital experiences and engaging with customers to retain them. In effect, the investment can move from focusing on reactive processes designed to fix problems to proactive systems that deliver the right experiences that generate revenues and maximise customer satisfaction.
Stephen Krajewski
VP of Marketing