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Can CSPs beat the buzzer on agility?

Okay…time’s almost up, telcos. The technology-centric approach is no longer enough, and the persistent lack of agility in operations is helping to squander the full business value of your investments. Here's how you can secure a future in the increasingly competitive communications industry.

Tim McElligott
04 Sep 2020
Can CSPs beat the buzzer on agility?

Can CSPs beat the buzzer on agility?

Sponsored by: Oracle communications

Okay…time’s almost up, telcos. The technology-centric approach is no longer enough to secure a future in the increasingly competitive communications industry. The clock has run down on time-consuming and costly incremental efforts to improve the experience for customers.

Sluggish half-measures toward fully addressing the clunkiness of customer-facing processes and systems and the subpar experience they provide does not match your awesome network engineering skills. The persistent lack of agility in operations is helping to squander all the goodwill you have built through a century of highly reliable performance. More importantly, the lack of agility is preventing you from realizing the full business value of continuous investment.

TM Forum research shows that for the last four years, communications service providers (CSPs) have most consistently identified the goal of agility as a primary driver of transformation. On average, 66% of CSPs have identified agility as the most important driver, second only to stronger customer relationships, which benefit from improving agility.

Building relationships

Even the, so far, limited success in developing the capabilities below has already demonstrated significant improvements in serving customers more responsively. However, these capabilities need to become part of operators’ DNA if they hope to serve customers more proactively and automatically – and in doing so develop actual relationships. These attributes help CSPs become what an increasing number claim they want to be: platform providers. Over the last three years, the number of CSPs saying they believe they should become platform providers that work with partners to bring their services to market has increased from 16% in 2018 to 25% in 2020.

  • End-to-end automation of processes is key to running a streamlined, cost-effective operations environment and being responsive and proactive.
  • Smarter, more competitive use of data enables timely personalized services and puts customer experience at the heart of how services are delivered.
  • Heterogeneous, multi-vendor environments end vendor lock-in and support a renewed best-of-breed approach for easily mixing and matching components from multiple suppliers.
  • An open software architecture provides the foundation for multi-party ecosystems, DevOps practices, and cloud native and microservices-based solutions.

Focus on omnichannel

While CSPs are working to create open architectures upon which they can deploy truly interoperable, multi-vendor solutions, they need to address the customer-facing challenge of omnichannel engagement. Customers are fed up with not having operator support follow them as they move from device to device, from service to service, and from a bot-led exchanges to an online self-help app or a live service rep. For customers it should be a single, seamless experience. Today it is not.

Time has shown that with the complexity of services and the speed of change, incremental improvements to individual processes and solutions cannot drive the level of transformation necessary for CSPs to anticipate and proactively meet the evolving demands of customers. It will take an architectural approach that focuses on the experience, supported by open systems, and maximizes the use of data.

There are many opportunities ahead for CSPs, and partnerships may be required for some of them. For example, CSPs may decide to partner for IoT, edge or platform-based application services. Or they can look at the graphic below to see that their value compared to the internet companies with which they now compete has already diminished and now it is time to make a choice. The bottom line is that CSPs need to be as agile or more agile than their potential partners to be able to pursue any business model. So, when it comes to agility, stop watching the shot clock and shoot the ball.

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