The mobile Internet has changed our life as well as the lifestyle. Most of us spend more time on Internet and mobile devices than on traditional media like TV, newspaper and radio. This shift only happened in a short period of 3-4 years whereas it boomed the digital life and the industry digitalization.
We’re more driven in our digital life via a “magic box”, the mobile phone, or, the mobile devices, in which we could have connection with the world everywhere and anytime. The original functions of the mobile phone, like texting, calling, have been less important and even become the source of junk messages and crank calls, which is out of expectation. Indeed, connection makes the world smaller, and the only distance among people is no longer geography, but time zones. Without connection in days, you may feel like abandoned by the whole world.
We truly thank the Internet companies who redefined our life behaviors and styles. They put customers at the heart of product design and development, every corner of people’s daily life may become the field they disrupt with Internet technology and innovative business models. Customer experience has become the most crucial factor to determine the future of the company, growth in the industry. Providing value services to your customers may eventually make customers much more valuable.
Well, the traditional telecom CSPs seem irrelevant with this digital booming, which should not be the case considering the advantages they have: huge amount of customer base, cutting-edge technologies, and trust-worthy brands in the market. However, it is the fact that they failed to monetize the advantages at hand and are lagging behind in taking the lead in the digital economy.
A majority of internet companies’ innovative business models and digital services can be replicated by CSPs. Tencent, China’s Internet giant has more than 800 million active users on its instant message service platforms. They developed over 3,400 products to users, covering communication service, social network, digital media, gaming, mobile payment and cloud service, building a real Eco-system. Within this ecosystem, Tencent has opened its platform to partners with unique digital ID, while the full and detailed customer profiles are still owned by Tencent.
The most frequently used service from Tencent are free communication service via QQ and Wechat, over 60% of revenue are from mobile gaming service (45%) and advertisement (18%). That makes us believe: CSPs may provide unlimited and free communication services to its customers, while get revenue from other value added digital services. It will happen someday, or is happening somewhere.
Operators actually can also leverage the relationships they have to build such a successful eco-system: providing very unique mobile ID, which is social asset and valuable enough to be shared in both physical and digital world; they also have large customer base to develop and trial some innovative digital services, rich customer dataset to explore and make analytics, strong finance and talents to support business development.
Does that mean the destiny of CSPs is doomed without any chance to fight back? Not exactly. The chances exist all around until you have good tools and technology to better leverage it, also it determines to what extent CSPs could disrupt today’s operational model and culture. Innovation and transformation are crucial to help operators build confidence and lead the digital competence.
In our concept, transformation includes business transformation and technology transformation, and the business transformation is supported by the technology transformation. The transformation process will lead CSPs to more open platform for partner collaboration, which are the main objectives we need to achieve in the entire transformation lifecycle.
ZTEsoft is a leading software vendor that has witnessed the history of telecom industry, from CT to ICT to digitalization eras. We believe winners in the digital economy will be players capable of leveraging their own investments and strengths through intensive partnership and innovative business models. Several key principles guiding the digital transformation (both for business and technology transformation) are listed as following:
Platform approach. Open platform should become the enablement for innovation services via “Internet speed”, delivering “Fail fast” capability to partners to quickly launch or withdraw products and services without losing too much investments in case of cold reaction from mass market.
CSPs could load these applications in an efficient way on an open platform with proper revenue sharing model among partners; it is kind of “PaaS” service to eco-system. Centralized customer base (both telecom customers and IoT customers), big data analytics engine and omni-channel customer engagement are the prerequisite for CSPs to develop open platform. These capabilities could provide real time feedback and reports to detect whether and how to evolve products, when to commission / de-commission alternative products to the market.
Omni-channel customer engagement. Once the open platform is ready for service, it is time to engage customers with packaged product offer via the marketing campaign platform. The customers should be assured with seamless experience among different channels and no start-over required when switching from in-store service to on-line mobile applications. Of course, customers should be categorized with channel preferences with real-time or knowledge-based analytics, taking into consideration of time slots and roaming status conditions.
Vertical industry business enablement. The ideal business model is: CSPs will unify the eco-system and use the single ID (unique mobile number) to access different IoT applications, and offer one-stop service to customers including medical, travel, logistics, property management, as well as one-stop service to partners. (Customer insights, analytics, go-to-market strategy, customer experience assurance, IoT network optimization and operation, smart revenue sharing, etc.)
Value services. Regardless of the number of innovative businesses CSPs offer to users, value counts the most. Gartner raised the concept of “Business moment” that exploits the connection of people, business and things and allows companies to innovate for entirely new scenarios. When specific scenario triggered the conditions, it can connect people, things and business and bring value to customers.
Our “Value” concept has much more wide scope than business moment. One example: When a customer has subscribed the connected car service from a CSP and car manufacture, the customer can get valuable advice (like real-time traffic re-routing, nearby service center recommendation, tire changing suggestions) all based on the sensor or GPS information or mobile cell information analysis. These services can greatly improve customer experience and bring value to customer journey.
Experience-oriented enhancement. People all greatly deemed the trigger to this digital transformation is customer experience enhancement. We all agree superior experience can bring surprising feedback to CSP business development and investments. CSPs need to understand customers’ needs proactively as they have the full resources at hands, and they know what can be complementary services for customers.
Real-time analytics and insights. It’s clear that Big Data Analytics tool is key and fundamental to succeed in digital transformation. Most operators have invested on BI analytics platform to understand customer needs as well as to adjust their business operation on-demand approach. CSPs have the unparalleled advantages to develop business analytics with the ownership of excellent datasets: cold data, warm data, and hot data. Fully utilization of big data tools can greatly boost CSPs’ business operation efficiency while enabling customer excellence.
For example, when customer is shopping at the CBD area at specific time, some ongoing promotions from partners can be offered to customers when they are searching near-by restaurants.
ZTEsoft consolidates these principles mentioned above as “POWER” (Platform, Omni-channel, Vertical industry solution, Value service, Experiece, Real-time insights) to drive the digital transformation success in an open and collaborative environment. The power of CSPs, vendors and industry players can be united together to offer unparalleled experience and competence on the way to digital success. Together with ZTEsoft in the digital transformation, we can gain the success.
