Best Practice

Customer and data-centric BSS

Telco & Media companies should embrace non-traditional market segments, partners and ecosystems to stay ahead of the competition. This means evolving and optimizing their BSS landscape to support the whole customer value chain.

Innovating the Telcos scenario

Most European Telecom providers have a high level of maturity and present a similar competitive outlook: they operate in a market with stagnating or decreasing revenues and where well-established leaders with a steady market share compete with other players, such as OTTs that are increasing their investment in telecommunications solutions. Furthermore, due to significant changes in customer behavior and expectation, Telco companies are making huge investments in networks, customer engagement and new offerings. Indeed, to survive in this challenging scenario, Telco providers have started to adopt new business models and create additional revenue streams, such as digital services (content delivery, cloud-based services, etc.).

More specifically, to stand out towards their competitors, Telco providers have to:

Focus on new sales
models

Reframing the business to capture the wide variety of opportunities developing in the market is essential for Telecom providers as they compete in the turbulence of disruption: thus, being nimble is one of the most relevant and critical success factors.

Reboot innovation strategy and approach to increase customer engagement

An effective digital customer engagement strategy will impact on Telco providers’ attractiveness. Customers want companies to monitor their data if this gives them a better experience. Therefore, a better digital customer engagement leads to more customer data as well as a better experience, which, in turn, improves profitability.

Exploit value from data to improve both external and internal processes

Telco providers have started to recognize the unexploited possibilities and have implemented solutions capable of extracting business value from data, but they are just at the beginning. There are different areas in which they could leverage data value: CX enhancement, real-time decision making, contextual marketing and operational efficiency.

How to achieve these results?

In this context, BSS landscapes have to evolve to become open, flexible and cost-effective capable of quickly supporting new business needs and integrating innovative solutions. Therefore, Telco providers should focus on:

Omni-channel CX

The main goal of Omni-channel CX is to create a seamless, cohesive and interconnected experience for the customers, regardless of whether they are using website, email, phone, social media or in-person channels to reach out to the Telco providers’ business. As we mentioned, this is one of the most critical key differentiating factors in customer decision-making.

The best way Telco providers can improve the CX is to streamline all the customer interactions across multiple touchpoints in a unified way to deliver a consistent brand experience. Therefore, Telco providers should map the whole customer journey across the different touchpoints to locate pain points and collect feedback from the customer by leveraging on surveys, reviews, etc. Once Telco Providers have locate the friction points, they should fix them to properly implement an effectively omni-channel strategy which has the following characteristics: availability, consistency, channel-neutrality and seamlessness.

Catalogue-driven architecture

One of the most relevant aspects of every Digital Transformation initiative is the centralized commercial catalogue, to provide a complete ecosystem for bundling and cataloguing all products and digital services offered by Media companies. This is possible due to an architecture where a single master enterprise-wide catalogue stores all the products and digital services, their definitions and specifications. All third-party systems query this centralized catalogue via APIs to gain access to any data that is required to fulfil any requests.

Real-time and convergent Billing solutions

Customer data consistency

During a Digital Transformation program, every Telco company implements a transitory architecture, where legacy systems and new solutions must coexist. Considering the high expectations of customers in terms of experience, hyper-personalization and digital integration, as well as during the transition toward the target architecture, it’s crucial to focus on customer data consistency.

Therefore, Telco Providers undertaking a Digital Transformation program should implement a master data management strategy to create a unified, accurate, clean and persistent set of attributes that describe a customer and that can be used to connect their data across different sources.

Why Reply?

Due to extensive experience in meeting Telecom & Media companies' business needs and drive value for their organization, Reply is able to provide strategic guidance to support Clients in preparing for new business opportunities or in improving the performance and the efficiency of existing ones.

Reply offers a wide range of services, including business planning and case development, defining processes and business requirements, market analysis of suitable products, solution design, configuration and build, quality testing, deployment and integration and end-user training.