Rethinking retail: How telcos can rise to the new customer challenge
A TM Forum Catalyst is demonstrating how CSPs can blend offline and online worlds to re-imagine themselves, their processes and their product offering to gain competitive edge in the digital age.
07 May 2019
Rethinking retail: How telcos can rise to the new customer challenge
A TM Forum Catalyst is demonstrating how CSPs can blend offline and online worlds to re-imagine themselves, their processes and their product offering to gain competitive edge in the digital age.
Understanding the customer, their behaviors and preferences are key to gaining competitive edge in the digital economy. Customer experience (CX) is widely regarded as the new battleground for businesses. In the new world of retail, it will be the companies that can successfully merge the online and offline environments, expand sales channels and, crucially, exploit big data to better understand their customers that will be the winners.
Communication service providers (CSPs) face a huge business transformation challenge in reinventing themselves as internet companies. They have to rethink how they sell their products as well as reimagine the value system around customer, product and channel. They have the advantage, though, of a most valuable asset: the large amount data collected from their customers and the detail that it includes.
To meet these challenges and capitalize on telcos’ strengths, a TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst project is building a new business operating system that aims to ensure CSPs are fit for the retailing future.
The New Retail – Digital Ecosystem Symphony Catalyst builds on the previous iteration, New Retail – Intelligent Boutique. This focused on transforming a China Telecom (the Catalyst Champion) store into the China Telecom Intelligent Business Hall in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
The team transformed the physical store by combining big data with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition software, intelligent queuing technology and smart terminals to deliver a completely new and customer-centric experience. For instance: with their consent, a customer can be quickly identified by facial recognition technology and receive sales recommendations based on analysis of their behavioral data.
A key differentiator of the Intelligent Boutique is the real name registration system. In China, regulation dictates that internet companies and CSPs must request and verify real names when customers register (as opposed to nicknames or remaining anonymous). This gives telcos a major advantage when designing a retail system in China.
In phase two, China Telecom is joined by China Unicom as a Catalyst Champion and the aim is to design a new business model for retail which comprises a “symphony of customer, product and channel” through digitalization with online/offline integration. As well as make CSPs more customer-centric, it will help to transform them into smart digital operators, increasing efficiency by making use of digital ecosystems, shared data, resources and capabilities.
Champions seek a solution to a business problem and work with Participants to rapidly develop a solution. In the New Retail – Digital Ecosystem Symphony Catalyst, the Participants from phase one – AsiaInfo, Sunrize Technology and Whale Cloud – are joined by Beijing Orient National Communication Science and Technology Company (BONC).
The Catalyst team is developing a new retail business operating system that will enable rapid e-shop set-up and allow telcos to expand both sales channel and product offering. Dr Zhu Jun, AsiaInfo, explains that this comes at a crucial time for CSPs.
“CSPs are facing major challenges when it comes to retailing and need to transform themselves into internet companies as well as be able to form alliances with partners and e-commerce companies like Alibaba Group,” he says. “They also need to make use of big data to help them do this, something telcos haven’t done previously.”
As well as being customer-focused, the operating system also increases efficiencies and optimizes business processes around product configuration and shelf, warehouse and supply chain management.
Once again, the platform has a major advantage because it can identify individuals by their real names because of the real-name registration system. The Catalyst team still had to make sure, though, that customer data imported from other systems was accurate and up-to-date, which presented one of the early challenges. “You can’t rely on old data from different systems to analyse a person’s behaviour,” says Dr Jun. “Which is why we needed to build a big data platform.”
The platform has also been designed to simplify and support the processes required to form commercial alliances and partnerships. One of the key features is a built-in rights management facility which enables partners to build retail ecosystems around telco operators. An omni-channel approach (which goes beyond the multi-channel approach) creates a far more seamless experience for the customer and integrates the physical store-e-shop experience. It also means their data is easily shared across the channels.
In addition, it helps telcos and their partners form horizontal alliances with a built-in rights exchange functionality. A telco could partner with an influencer or celebrity, for example, and target fans with customized products.
As well as an e-shop front-end and built-in artificial intelligence to enable customer-centric operations like product recommendations, the operating platform has a powerful back-end to support the re-engineered business processes required for such digital transformation. Dr Jun explains that the TM Forum Business process Framework (eTOM) was central to this.
“You can’t just follow traditional processes to make an operating platform like this,” he says, explaining that the Business Process Framework allowed the Catalyst team to break business operations down into microservices.
“This meant we could quickly develop the right products for different activities like promotion and marketing. This was essential because in the world of new retail, you need to be more agile,” Dr Jun said.
The team will share best practice of its use of the Framework and will also contribute back to some of TM Forum’s Open APIS which were used extensively to integrate customer, product and payment data.
At Digital Transformation World, visitors will be able to see the operating platform in action. The Catalyst team will also report on results from China Telecom’s Intelligent Business Hall in Kuala Lumpur from phase one, including information on passenger flow and conversion rates, and the impact of working with partners to expand product offerings.
Learn more by watching this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019:
Understanding the customer, their behaviors and preferences are key to gaining competitive edge in the digital economy. Customer experience (CX) is widely regarded as the new battleground for businesses. In the new world of retail, it will be the companies that can successfully merge the online and offline environments, expand sales channels and, crucially, exploit big data to better understand their customers that will be the winners.
Communication service providers (CSPs) face a huge business transformation challenge in reinventing themselves as internet companies. They have to rethink how they sell their products as well as reimagine the value system around customer, product and channel. They have the advantage, though, of a most valuable asset: the large amount data collected from their customers and the detail that it includes.
To meet these challenges and capitalize on telcos’ strengths, a TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst project is building a new business operating system that aims to ensure CSPs are fit for the retailing future.
Scaling up the Intelligent Boutique
The New Retail – Digital Ecosystem Symphony Catalyst builds on the previous iteration, New Retail – Intelligent Boutique. This focused on transforming a China Telecom (the Catalyst Champion) store into the China Telecom Intelligent Business Hall in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur.
The team transformed the physical store by combining big data with technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), facial recognition software, intelligent queuing technology and smart terminals to deliver a completely new and customer-centric experience. For instance: with their consent, a customer can be quickly identified by facial recognition technology and receive sales recommendations based on analysis of their behavioral data.
A key differentiator of the Intelligent Boutique is the real name registration system. In China, regulation dictates that internet companies and CSPs must request and verify real names when customers register (as opposed to nicknames or remaining anonymous). This gives telcos a major advantage when designing a retail system in China.
Creating a symphony
In phase two, China Telecom is joined by China Unicom as a Catalyst Champion and the aim is to design a new business model for retail which comprises a “symphony of customer, product and channel” through digitalization with online/offline integration. As well as make CSPs more customer-centric, it will help to transform them into smart digital operators, increasing efficiency by making use of digital ecosystems, shared data, resources and capabilities.
Champions seek a solution to a business problem and work with Participants to rapidly develop a solution. In the New Retail – Digital Ecosystem Symphony Catalyst, the Participants from phase one – AsiaInfo, Sunrize Technology and Whale Cloud – are joined by Beijing Orient National Communication Science and Technology Company (BONC).
The Catalyst team is developing a new retail business operating system that will enable rapid e-shop set-up and allow telcos to expand both sales channel and product offering. Dr Zhu Jun, AsiaInfo, explains that this comes at a crucial time for CSPs.
“CSPs are facing major challenges when it comes to retailing and need to transform themselves into internet companies as well as be able to form alliances with partners and e-commerce companies like Alibaba Group,” he says. “They also need to make use of big data to help them do this, something telcos haven’t done previously.”
As well as being customer-focused, the operating system also increases efficiencies and optimizes business processes around product configuration and shelf, warehouse and supply chain management.
Once again, the platform has a major advantage because it can identify individuals by their real names because of the real-name registration system. The Catalyst team still had to make sure, though, that customer data imported from other systems was accurate and up-to-date, which presented one of the early challenges. “You can’t rely on old data from different systems to analyse a person’s behaviour,” says Dr Jun. “Which is why we needed to build a big data platform.”
Simplifying commercial alliances
The platform has also been designed to simplify and support the processes required to form commercial alliances and partnerships. One of the key features is a built-in rights management facility which enables partners to build retail ecosystems around telco operators. An omni-channel approach (which goes beyond the multi-channel approach) creates a far more seamless experience for the customer and integrates the physical store-e-shop experience. It also means their data is easily shared across the channels.
In addition, it helps telcos and their partners form horizontal alliances with a built-in rights exchange functionality. A telco could partner with an influencer or celebrity, for example, and target fans with customized products.
Reinventing business processes
As well as an e-shop front-end and built-in artificial intelligence to enable customer-centric operations like product recommendations, the operating platform has a powerful back-end to support the re-engineered business processes required for such digital transformation. Dr Jun explains that the TM Forum Business process Framework (eTOM) was central to this.
“You can’t just follow traditional processes to make an operating platform like this,” he says, explaining that the Business Process Framework allowed the Catalyst team to break business operations down into microservices.
“This meant we could quickly develop the right products for different activities like promotion and marketing. This was essential because in the world of new retail, you need to be more agile,” Dr Jun said.
The team will share best practice of its use of the Framework and will also contribute back to some of TM Forum’s Open APIS which were used extensively to integrate customer, product and payment data.
At Digital Transformation World, visitors will be able to see the operating platform in action. The Catalyst team will also report on results from China Telecom’s Intelligent Business Hall in Kuala Lumpur from phase one, including information on passenger flow and conversion rates, and the impact of working with partners to expand product offerings.
Update
Learn more by watching this video filmed at Digital Transformation World 2019:
