Connected commerce is key to telcos offering an Amazon-like experience
The Mind Reader Catalyst is showing how telcos can boost profits and retention by connecting all their systems to provide a single view of the customer and user experience to rival Amazon's.
Sarah Wray
10 May 2019
Connected commerce is key to telcos offering an Amazon-like experience
At Digital Transformation World in Nice, France, this week, an ongoing TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept called Mind Reader is showing how telcos can boost profits and retention by connecting all their systems to provide a single view of the customer and user experience to rival Amazon's.
Amazon’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) is 63 compared to telcos, which have an average score of just 5, according to analysis by WDS, a Xerox company. Some communications service providers (CSPs) have even seen NPS scores in the minus figures.
Since NPS measures customer experience and predicts business growth, it’s crucial for CSPs to shift the dial on it. But it’s tough for telcos to even come close to Amazon's customer experience because of their legacy systems and processes as well as their complex architectures, which have been expanded and added to over decades. This fragmentation means telcos don’t have a single view of the customer or what they want.
Mind Reader
Despite the challenges, CSPs must fill this customer experience gap if they want to stay relevant and competitive in the digital world. The Mind Reader Catalyst, now in its second phase, is showing how.
“Amazon knows what we want before we know it,” says Mustafa Oyumi, Vice President, Industry Solutions at CloudSense (one of the companies taking part in the Catalyst). “The essence of this Catalyst is we want to learn what the customer’s intent is to offer next-best action recommendations.”
This approach applies not only to commerce channels, but to all customer engagement channels, including self-care. Achieving the vision will allow telcos to offer highly personalized products and services and better plan capacity and commercial offers to meet customers’ expectations. All this will add up to higher margins and much better retention.
Connected commerce
This phase of the Catalyst builds on a previous iteration which was demonstrated at Digital Transformation Asia in Kuala Lumpur in 2018. The first round of the project detailed the concept, and now the team is ready to put the theory into practice.
The Catalyst champions are Telstra and Vodafone. Catalyst champions bring a business challenge and work alongside participants – in this case, CloudSense, Infosys, Nokia, Socia and Salesforce – to rapidly develop a solution.
Watch the champions from Telstra explain the first phase of the project:
“This Catalyst introduces the concept of connected commerce," Oyumi says. "Typically in the communications industry, the commerce platform is fragmented. It’s separate from all other channels as well as underlying systems like the CRM (customer relationship management) system.”
In Nice, the team will show how commerce can be connected to back-end systems like CRM, product catalogs, configure-price-quote (CPQ) and order management.
“So many companies could take this whole stack that we are building and they would have everything they needed to actually launch this Amazon-like commerce experience to their customers,” Oyumi says.
Quadstar shows the way
The Catalyst team will demonstrate their solution via a fictitious multi-service operator called Quadstar. The multi-service aspect is very important, Oyumi says, “because we want to impress the idea that it’s one connected commerce layer that serves all your customers. You don't need to have one for B2B, one for B2C, one for small and medium businesses, etc. – it’s one commerce platform.”
The demo will show the mobile user experience for a customer who is looking for a tariff plan that includes unlimited international roaming. This isn’t offered by any service providers as it would be prohibitively expensive, but the project will show how this can be turned into a positive if you have the right customer information.
When the customer arrives at the Salesforce commerce cloud via a campaign, she will be prompted to answer a couple of questions to find out what she's interested in relating to packages, plans, device, etc. The customer will then be led to a unique and personalized commerce platform, which will show recommended products and plans. As unlimited roaming is unavailable, it might show, for example, a 4GB plan.
Once the customer chooses and pays for her products and services, order management kicks in and she can track the order via self-care. The system will also make future in-app recommendations based on usage and other aspects learned about the customer – suggesting an upgrade to an 8GB plan, for example.
Customer interactions can better inform telco roadmaps. The system could flag, for instance, that multiple customers are requesting fiber to the home in an area where it isn't currently available. As a result, the telco could consider rolling it out and providing an offer to those people.
“It's an end-to-end revenue growth, customer experience, cost-cutting story and will show how telcos can deliver Amazon-like customer experiences – which no one is doing today,” Oyumi says.
The Catalyst uses TM Forum Open APIs for order orchestration, order management and service fulfillment, and will contribute back to these as well as providing input for one or two additional APIs related to intent management.
Soon after the demonstration next week at Digital Transformation World the team plans to offer a commercial product.
“This is a very heavy-duty proof of concept,” says Oyumi. “We're building phase 0.1 of a product.”
He added that Telstra is already carrying out experiments and trials and will be ready to deploy the solution soon.
Learn more by watching this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019: