Last updated: Create new telco business opportunities with adaptive commerce

Create new telco business opportunities with adaptive commerce

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Market demands and transformation are requiring operators to increase operational efficiency and migrate towards more flexible and fully configurable software platforms across a range of sell-side operations and other business processes.

And, the growth of big data has meant that old legacy IT systems, built and managed in silos, now need to be replaced. The convergence of telecoms and IT has in turn led to the emergence of cloud-based services, which are gaining increasing relevance and acceptance in developed and emerging markets.

In response to this, operators now need to adopt new business models so they can take advantage of these technologies to bring in new revenue generating services to their customer base. This trend also presents a major opportunity for small to medium size businesses, as well as large enterprises, as they can gain better services and pricing from operators.

Digital evolution of telco: The challenges

The challenge, however, for many operators is that their existing systems weren’t designed for this new service arena. They need comprehensive, flexible and agile systems that can adapt to the changing service domain and deliver retail-grade experiences to users buying a complex array of telecoms-related services.

The starting point for service providers is that the telecoms market is evolving at a rapid pace and to keep up there is a lot of pressure to invest in new business models. Operators are subject to constant commodization changes which is reducing revenues, increasing churn and placing pressure on ARPU. In addition, with ever increasing competition from non-telecoms related organizations, the industry needs to become more operationally efficient by lowering customer acquisition costs, improving the customer buying experience across all sales channels and reducing the total cost of ownership.

To achieve this, new platforms and approaches are needed. Operators need more flexibility and a fully configurable platform for their sell-side operations. They need to facilitate better customer service and pricing consistency, so when a customer goes into a store the products and pricing they see are the same as online and there is consistency across all the channels involved.

That is what is really missing now.

Ready, set grow: Intelligent bundling holds great opportunity

Achieving sustainable growth for operators is aligned to enabling new business models and propositions such as cloud services but they remain in an intensely competitive environment in which customer loyalty exists as a concept but is far more fleeting in reality.

Research from Google Retail has found that two-thirds of shoppers consider two or more devices before purchasing a device and 47 percent consider two or more operators, while 30 percent switch operators when purchasing.

Operators therefore need to provide appealing bundles of products and services — both voice and digital — that have been intelligently assembled to meet more the individualized needs of users.

We see intelligent bundling as a way to achieve sustainable growth:

  1. There has been a change in levels of customer loyalty — so operators need greater transparency and need to be up to date in their support of mobile devices, tablets and smartphones.
  2. Greater business agility is an obvious attribute for operators to invest in given market characteristics of dwindling customer loyalty and a more diverse and fragmented service portfolio.
  3. Cloud services and digital content have radically expanded operators’ service and product portfolios so they need the ability to extend their platform to enable big data driven personalization for their customers to support the proper marketing and selling of these.

Not only do operators need to engage with customers across an array of channels, they need to achieve that consistently and in a way that enables a single view of the customer to be maintained.

About 80 percent of consumers start their buying journey online and every transaction that starts out online is five times more likely to lead to a purchase in-store.

Therefore you need a single view of your customer and your customer needs a single view of you.

Telcos play a massive role in connecting the in-store and online shopping experience

Operators have recognized that they must provide a better in-store and online retail experience because of customer demands, which are centered on a single view of the brand and not separate, standalone sales channels.

The ability to fulfill the customer’s needs in-store is really important because we’re seeing customers make preliminary decisions online, then buying or reserving items for in-store collection.

All of the elements in that transaction have to be facilitated and synchronized. However, operators are not just retailers and their businesses are an order of magnitude more complex than a simple retail business.

Take the example of buying a smartphone on a 24 month contract—operators must be able to handle all the subscriptions and entitlements within that plan and, as the service portfolio widens, it only gets more complex.

When you think about OTT services like video on demand, it’s clear that value-added services have become more and more important in the telecoms world. Operators have become service providers for digital assets and services.

We’re also seeing that in the IT market, where operators are buying into the IT services sector which is resulting in more cloud and big data services. This trend will continue.

However, as service provisioning gets more complex, so too will customer service.

Operators will have to improve their capabilities in this regard. Integrated capabilities will be needed to enable users to check on the progress of an order. For example, helping you to fulfill a shopping cart or manage the order process is another important factor when it comes to the channel. When you’re aggregating services, good front end management is critical.

Operators will need to build applications very quickly, as consumers move to an omni-channel model and increased familiarity with consuming services from the cloud.

Cloud services in themselves bring up a number of opportunities. In telecoms we are looking at cloud services from a B2B perspective, as internet-based connectivity is driving growth rates in B2B for services such as managed IP, PBX systems, and VoIP.

In addition, unified communications and cross platform integration is growing, for example desktop video conferencing and applications that can be used seamlessly across devices such as PCs, tablets and smartphones. A consequence of these types of services is that operators will be able to reduce cost and complexity to their customers.

To support that you need an e-commerce platform that is really agile, service-oriented architecture based, and able to expand as your business expands.

The convergence between IT and telecoms is creating a new wave of cloud-based B2B opportunities which will form the foundation of the experiences users receive.

At the same time, operators are getting more complex and need to deal with the challenges of handling more channels such as OTT. Operators need to take advantage of the cloud opportunity but the systems out there already in place are being asked to do things they weren’t designed for.

This convergence of telecoms and IT has given rise to an accelerated level of big data and B2B services. It is therefore more important than ever for operators and service providers to ensure their sell-side operations support an omni-channel experience for their customers buying these more complex and higher value services, while offering a full self-service capability.

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Written by Peter Conquest
Business development director at telco, hybris

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