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Why it’s time to ‘stop thinking like a telco’

Mahindra Comviva's CTO, Aditya Dhruva, gives us the company's perspective on how CSPs need to change their approaches and processes to become more effective digital competitors.

27 Sep 2018
Why it’s time to ‘stop thinking like a telco’

Why it’s time to ‘stop thinking like a telco’

Comviva is the global leader of mobility solutions catering to The Business of Tomorrows. The company is a subsidiary of Tech Mahindra and a part of the $20.7 billion Mahindra Group. Its extensive portfolio of solutions spans digital financial services, customer value management, messaging and broadband solution and digital lifestyle services and managed VAS services. It enables service providers to enhance customer experience, rationalize costs and accelerate revenue growth. Comviva’s solutions are deployed by over 130 mobile service providers and financial institutions in over 95 countries and enrich the lives of over two billion people to deliver a better future. For more information, please visit www.mahindracomviva.com
We spoke to CTO Aditya Dhruva to get the Comviva perspective on how CSPs need to change their approaches and processes in order to become more effective digital competitors.
Aditya Dhruva, CTO, Mahindra Comviva
Digital Transformation; improving the customer experience; embracing platform business models. These are all things we hear CSPs need — and are working — to address. In the face of such huge tasks, how should they start?

Operators do not always see the big picture and, because of this, they are struggling to shake off their ‘telecom’ mindset. The days of closed ecosystems where the CSPs control access to the customer are long gone. So changing that mindset is one of the biggest challenges CSPs face today: They have to learn to stop thinking like telcos! Because to continue thinking that way is to risk losing the plot.

How does that apply to the customer experience?

Operators need to separate how customer experience is viewed and managed for infrastructure services from how it is managed for digital and other millennial services. It has to be completely different.

At one end of the customer experience you have the traditional aspects of connectivity and access like issues of network quality, call drop rates, service uptime, billing queries, plan changes etc., which needs to be handled.

But at the other end you have the customer experience which relates to the digital services they provide. They ways in which operators benchmark themselves need to be different for these. Going for one common measurement will not make the cut.

In what ways does customer experience need to be different for digital services?

Well, for these services operators might want to be benchmarking their customer experience against the likes of Netflix, Facebook or Google, who represent the pinnacle of digital services today. And much of the success of these digital companies stems from how they approach their end customers.

It’s all about self-service, no onerous contracts, much more simplicity in the ways end users access services or pay for services. You don’t have to call a call centre to get things done or go to a physical store. How many users today have really reached out to a Facebook or Netflix support teams? Or visited their offices? Do they even have one?

So should CSPs be moving away from human interaction with their customers to an entirely digital experience?

It’s horses for courses. I manage 99% of my interaction with a machine when I purchase something on Amazon. But when I can’t get an answer, or I’m unhappy with a delay, I can talk to a human who will help me. But the important thing is that I get to talk to a person only when I want to, not because the service provider is requiring me to. The ability to provide all of these varied forms of customer interaction, to be used on the customer’s own terms, is very important for CSPs.

What about the services themselves? How do these need to evolve to improve customer experience?

Old telco thinking is focused on monetizing things like bulk SMS, voice minutes, and data bundles. But, for CSPs in a digital world, the focus needs to be on the end use case, or the end-customer problem which needs to be solved. This is particularly important when it comes to enterprise customers; CSP’s need to start to appreciate the use-cases of the Enterprise, for which connectivity is just one of the building blocks – can CSP’s change their mindset from selling what they have, to providing what Enterprises want?

The thought process I recommend to any CSP is to accept that, in today’s world, the CSP doesn’t hold all the aces. Gone are the days when CSP’s wanted exclusivity with every new thing. They should focus on exposing their assets via APIs, so enterprise customers can choose what they want to integrate, and how they want to build it into their workflows. 2-Sided platforms are what Enterprises prefer today. CSP’s need to be seen as those platform enablers rather than a closed eco-system. Because of this closed nature, it led to new businesses like CPaaS start (e.g. Twilio), because they understood the pain of the Enterprise when using communication channels and looked to solve those problems. This could potentially have been a direct CSP game.

Which brings us back to CSPs benchmarking against the large digital native players...

To a degree. Nobody is suggesting that CSPs can mimic these companies and suddenly achieve success on the scale of Amazon or Google. But CSPs can do a lot better than they are doing today; they can scale much better if they apply the platform approach.

Part of the challenge they face, of course, is a dearth of those digital native skills, and that needs to be addressed. Perhaps with advisory relationships, or partnerships, or acquisition of digital native companies.

There is a particular challenge on the sales side. They tend to be focused on selling pipes and packs. They need to approach their customers, especially enterprise customers and tell them how the CSP can solve their problems using their assets. The development of truly consultative sales processes is extremely important. Why I am stressing on the Enterprise is because, the ability of a CSP to extract an extra dollar out of a consumer directly is long gone. The future growth lies in Enterprise business and Digital services – IOT, Mobile Engagement, customer analytics and insights, new-age digital content and payment services etc.

Can CSPs learn anything here from their relationships with their own suppliers?

Yes, absolutely. CSPs should look at their vendors as partners in their business. They need to build an ecosystem of partners that are equally motivated to help them succeed. That means a shift from capex-heavy investment to Risk-Reward partnership. This approach will increase the innovation and talent to which CSPs have access.

They need to embrace the fact that innovation can happen anywhere outside of their company. Once they are open to that idea, then they can really begin to move forward. In the digital era, any player which believes it has all the answers is not going to win.