B2B employee engagement: an opportunity, not a chore

Commercial context

CSP revenues are now increasingly coming from B2B initiatives with 63% of B2B customers saying they prefer to engage through digital channels. It’s therefore essential for CSPs to stay relevant to potential business customers – and being relevant to the employees of those customers is an important route to this. Future CSP success in extending customer lifetime value (CLV) relies in part on finding effective ways of integrating what they have to offer with the fabric of target customer organizations, beyond engagement only with key decision-makers.

The dramatic changes in professional life over the last few years, with vastly more employees working from home, provide a compelling opportunity to do this – particularly via digital onboarding of employees who may no longer share a regular physical workspace with their new colleagues. There are currently however no digital engagement solutions from CSPs that give B2B customers the frictionless access, flexibility, and control they need in non-HR self-onboarding of employees – nor for the digital personas needed for employees or management to maintain accounts and services in terms of shopping and purchases, monitoring usage, billing, and payments.

The solution

Solving this challenge would help reduce inefficiencies caused by siloed systems while placing CSPs front and center of a new seamless digital experience extending to the employee level of B2B customers. This gap in the market has been identified for resolution by the B2B Employee Digital Engagement Drives Lifetime Value Catalyst – which is assembling capabilities from multiple digital touchpoints, telco- and ecommerce-aware customer journeys, digital marketplaces and digital business support systems (BSS) to connect employees with the assets, services and networks they need to carry out their duties most effectively. And, importantly, the outputs will be digitally refined and personalized with use, to ensure the most relevant experiences are enjoyed by the individual - avoiding the user friction associated with excessively generic experiences.

Application and wider value

This will be achieved using TM Forum’s Customer Experience Management Suite through to Open Digital Architecture (ODA), combined with the above to provide CSPs with a cloud-native solution that can be deployed by the CSP for the benefit of their B2B customer and its employees. This means not only a new digital marketplace and advice of charge invoices to make CSP products and services conveniently available, but just about anything the employee might need – right down to a desk or a chair. For the B2B customer themselves, this will be supported with a range of capabilities including AI-based digital identity management for workforce verification, intent-based personas for consistent and seamless customer journeys, and a rich assortment of dashboards and analytics so the particulars and successes of a specific interactions can be tracked, measured, and continuously improved.

“Catalyst projects bring together some of the brightest minds in the industry from organizations like AwareX and their partners to solve big challenges, said Aaron Boasman-Patel, Vice President, AI, Labs & Innovation at TM Forum. “We were excited to see the results of this collaboration and the possibilities that it unlocks for champions like AT&T showcased at this year’s DTW23 - Ignite event.”

By offering this missing capability to their B2B customers CSPs can not only expand their B2B proposition, grow CLV and enhance revenues, but also gain competitive advantage by expanding their brand equity into the wider fabric of the customer organization through engagement at all levels. Relevant research indicates that an engaged customer helps increase profitability by 23% . This solution has the potential to turn every interaction experience into a value-adding service moments between CSP and B2B customer – with pre-configured customer journeys resulting in actionable business insights – driving the available growth in B2B revenues for the industry through longer, deeper and more meaningful relationships in a highly competitive market.