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Coming to terms with digital reality – what does it mean to you?

07 Dec 2016
Coming to terms with digital reality – what does it mean to you?

Coming to terms with digital reality – what does it mean to you?

A super-panel debated this topic at TM Forum Live! Asia – here are their collective top 12 pieces of advice on how to get to grips with the realities of digital transformation and succeed, wherever you are in the world. It’s about business transformation, not technology, according to Seda Dolen, Head of Digital Business, South East Asia and Oceana, Ericsson. She added that top management must play its part in breaking down operational silos, which are everywhere, and to keep motivation and momentum going. Although transformation is a long journey, companies need milestones and short-term tangible outcomes. Transformation is a journey, not a project – be prepared for a long haul, with moving goals, not a nine-month effort or you’ll fail. Keeping direct contact with customers is a key driver for transformation to avoid becoming a commodity, because, as Abel Tong, Senior Director and Product Marketing Team Leader, Ciena Blue Planet Division, said, “If what you are offering is a commodity, you don’t have mindshare. If you don’t have the mindshare [customers] can go anywhere; it doesn’t matter to them.” Customer experience is a great differentiator: Rod Strother, VP, Digital Transformation, StarHub, pointed out that it’s easy for competitors to copy pricing, promotional campaigns and even products, fast, but very hard to replicate excellent customer experience easily or quickly. Transformation is for future, as well as existing, customers: Strother said companies need to, “raise all the boats in the water.” Geert Warlop, Chief Operating Officer, TrueMoney International, True Corporation, agreed. He said Asia is a diverse market, even within single countries: “In Jakarta there are 9 million people, so if I develop an app a get 1 million users, great, but there are 250 million people in the rest of the country; that is not a success”. He explained how True reaches out to customers using thousands of agents in six markets. Don’t just repeat the same stuff digitally: Sri Safitri, Senior Advisor of CEO Digital Business, Telkom Indonesia, said the team assembled by the C-suite to oversee the transformation assignment must think differently – for example,”it has to think about exponential growth versus linear.” Understanding and educating customers is essential: Warlop said you might think you’ve got a great app, but if your agents and customers need much training to use it, it won’t succeed. He pointed out some medicine packets show one pill against the silhouette of a bed to indicate for patients who can’t read they should take one pill at bedtime. Customers should be part of every design process from the start. Data is good, but can’t tell you everything: Making the most from data about customers is viewed as work in progress in the communications industry – no one has yet worked out how to get the maximum value from the data they collect and analyze. Dolan pointed out that humans are all about emotion, which is very subjective and about perception; we must never forget this. Also, perceptions often depend on how experienced customers are with using digital services. Personas help personalize services, said Safitri. Her company, Telkom Indonesia, bases segmentation on customers’ community by looking at big data, and especially their behavior such as do they use ecommerce or are they a Spotify fan? Do they only make calls, or use iPads or Android, etc.? Then the company decides which personas are relevant to any new service, by creating scenarios that include them. In short, customer behavior is key to product development. Listen to your customers: Kashif Haq, CITO, Axiata Digital Services, advised service providers to “bring customers into your building and they will tell you so much that you need to know and you could spend millions on data analysis and not find out.” Be ready for the unexpected: Tong pointed out all the data in the world could not have predicted the staggering popularity of Pokémon Go and the terabytes of data it generated that flooded networks all over the world. The answer is to prepare for the unexpected, by having a hugely flexible network and infrastructure. Leverage technology to speed up: Tong added that everything at a network operator is too slow. He said an operator can probably manage to launch no more than five or six new services a year, so “if you only have five or six magic bullets a year, you cannot afford to fail.” He added, “There is technology that’s new and different, that gives you the control you need to use your network’s capabilities. Use it and take charge of your own destiny.”