With no killer app in sight, success depends on driving revenue from a next wave of short-lived consumable products and services.
It comes as no surprise that service providers are looking at ways to diversify their offerings and access new sources of revenue to bolster their business performance. They face a series of significant challenges as markets saturate, traditional services commoditize and the investment burden of rolling out new network technologies – such as 5G wireless – continues unabated. However, there is no killer app out there that will staunch the bleeding. Instead, service providers will succeed by rapidly offering highly personalized and often short-lived services.
These services will increasingly be delivered in partnership for both consumer offerings and enterprise services, such as spinning up mobile broadband connections for remote offices, or for internet of things (IoT) applications. Some will be high value services but many will be low value, high volume propositions and the traditional approach of extensive testing, coupled with complex back office support software will be too slow, too expensive and too unattractive to suit customers’ requirements.
Communications companies need to look at themselves differently to succeed in this new marketplace and achieving mass personalization with a lifestyle service provider approach is the key to that. They need to create, sell and deliver services seamlessly, in an automated way and without error across all their channels.
The create-sell-deliver approach stands in contrast to service providers who have traditionally invested in the post-sales experience through focusing on customer care and billing alongside network innovation. That created a hugely complex OSS/BSS infrastructure. Now service providers need to get new revenues from customers, attract digital natives and monetize new business models. Traditional OSS/BSS has not been designed for this and cannot be force-fitted to new models.
‘Create-sell-deliver’ is about capabilities that enable innovation to be created rapidly, sold dynamically – primarily through digital channels – and delivered rapidly to get it into the hands of users as soon as possible. The create-sell-deliver process is therefore the business flow that is essential for service providers to create in order for them to introduce not a single killer app, but hundreds, possibly thousands, of mass personalized individual apps. It’s the incremental revenues from these that will change the picture for service providers’ top and bottom lines.
With solid customer relationship management systems already in place, the focus needs to be on managing create-sell-deliver processes effectively. Yet this is a very different set of processes to the traditional service provider business and it requires a new approach. Service providers must therefore stop trying to do more with their legacy OSS/BSS and, instead, look to overlay existing systems with systems that have been specifically designed for new models.
Keep it simple, retain what is good and works well, such as CRM, but overlay new systems to handle the create-sell-deliver processes. This will enable service providers to harness new innovations, facilitate service creation, perhaps through open application programme interfaces (APIs), put a frictionless sales process in place and, finally, assure the delivery of the service. The happier service providers make customers by creating a wide choice of attractive services, letting customers buy via the channels they select and ensuring service quality is maximized, the less service providers will have to do post-sales.
The more service providers get right in create-sell-deliver, the less they will need to invest in their post-sales systems. In effect, the investment can move from focusing on reactive, post-sales systems designed to address issues to focusing on proactive systems of lifestyle service provider that generate revenues and maximise customer satisfaction.
