Lessons from Dialog Axiata & stc on CX transformation

This article complements our recent report Taking a cloud native approach to customer experience. Download it now to find out the most common success factors that are driving customer experience transformations for CSPs around the globe. As telco transformation experts reflect on their experiences, clear lessons can be drawn from their successes, but unexpected benefits have also emerged. The importance of cultural transformation as the glue to tie together all the elements of a customer experience (CX) transformation, or digital transformation, cannot be overstated. It is clear from speaking with practitioners and examining success stories that investments in skills education are paying off. Anecdotally, practitioners consistently speak of more motivated teams that largely welcome new skills training and have embraced ways of working where each team member’s contribution to success is evident. Cloud native technology’s power is harnessed when an organization has the skills not only to leverage it, but to maximize it and deliver competitively superior customer experiences within or across any type of channel or business model.

Cultural transformation should produce the right skills

“Demand for agile operations and technology shifts have created unnecessary barriers between teams and organizational departments," says Mohammed A. Alabbadi, Vice President - Wholesale, stc. He says these barriers can be "addressed with cross-functional roles, tools and processes along with Agile strategy, a design thinking mindset and by implementing a DevOps organizational approach.” Typically, a DevOps team will need a combination of skills such as expertise in containerization and CI/CD tools; knowledge of how microservices communicate via APIs; operations systems and processes; and how to configure intra-network facilities, like proxying and tunneling.

Suppliers must bring cloud native culture, skills and technology

Contributions from cloud native suppliers, of both skills and technology, have proven a common success factor across CX transformations. Expertise in CX, cloud native solutions, and the skills to deliver in a setting governed by Agile, DevOps, and CI/CD/CT principles has become a requirement. Many suppliers in the telecom ecosystem have invested in their own transformations to bring the expertise, industry knowledge and institutional memory they have developed over decades, into the cloud native technology world. Those that are not committed to such a transition are likely to face far greater scrutiny and are unlikely to meet the changing requirements CSPs are presenting to their suppliers across technology, culture, and commercial models.

Remember to try before you buy

The cloud native market’s economics have matured so that CSPs that go cloud native can effectively try carrier-grade solutions before they buy. “Being cloud-native has helped us to try POCs [packet order corrections] with different vendors before we buy products,” says Rakesh Ajbani, Senior GM – Digital CX & Omnichannel, Dialog Axiata. Dialog is a noted digital and customer experience leader in its region, having successfully executed an award-winning, enterprise-wide digital transformation. “It has helped us de-risk a lot of the projects,” Ajbani says.

Ajbani advises peers not to become overly engrossed in comparing feature sets and scalability metrics, but instead to use rapid PoCs to identify suppliers and products that add the most value the fastest for the best cost. This PoC-based approach to the supplier ecosystem has been a major reason Dialog continues to innovate, he says. “If not for cloud, we would have had to invest huge amounts in infrastructure to do these POCs which give us the flexibility to stay agile and try out newer and more innovative technologies to help improve our CX,” Ajbani says. For more about how CSPs are taking their CX cloud native, download the TM Forum report Taking a cloud native approach to customer experience.