Top 5 business benefits of digital transformation for telecom

Introduction

With declining revenues from traditional services, the growing threat of OTT players, and customers swiftly embracing a more digital lifestyle, operators need to keep reinventing themselves by offering new and differentiated services to their customers. Digital transformation is key to this reinvention, which means the ability to offer advanced services through delivery channels preferred by customers. Plus, it enables operators to improve efficiency by streamlining their business processes, further improving revenue through reduced operational costs. Digital transformation is a massive undertaking for any telco, demanding considerable investment, in terms of resources, time, and of course, money. Often, it takes years for an operator to transform their infrastructure and processes. What decides the success of this undertaking is knowing where to begin and investing in key focal points that will bring visible changes to the network. In our experience of facilitating network modernization projects around the globe, we’ve found that telcos gain immediate benefits after a successful BSS transformation, even when they choose to roll out in phases and reinvest as they derive ROI.

Top five benefits of digital transformation

In planning a digital transformation, make sure the solution you deploy will produce these benefits:

Transforming the customer experience

Digital transformation means enabling a digital lifestyle through a host of next-generation services, including the advancement to 5G. From smart homes, smart buildings and cities, to autonomous vehicles and industrial IoT applications in manufacturing, telcos will be able to harness the full monetization potential of the next-gen network through unique and differentiated services. In addition to improving CX by supporting advanced service offerings, digital transformation is also meant to enhance customer relationship management through increased engagement, more cross-selling and up-selling opportunities, consistently evolving offerings to keep pace with changing customer needs, and ensuring swift and seamless issue resolution. A modern BSS transformation includes CX-focused features such as:

• digital CRM to serve as a unified 360-degree platform to manage all customer interactions
• digitized customer journeys, including digital onboarding, electronic KYC, and more
• interactive omnichannel self-care with integrated chatbots for social media platforms to ensure your customers can engage with you 24x7x365, making them self-reliant to solve problems quickly and efficiently, and granting more control over their accounts
• personalized and innovative rewards programs to build customer loyalty and brand differentiation throughout the customer life cycle
• contextual plans for different customer segments based on their location, usage needs, and more

Accurate data-driven insights

One of the key benefits of digital transformation is gaining access to key data insights to continually measure the pulse of your customers and modify not only plans and offerings, but also your long-term business strategies and goals. Effectively using Business Intelligence (BI) insights improve ROI and revenue. A next-gen digital BSS platform provides granular and customizable reports for advanced customer segmentation. Using the data from these reports, you can create personalized and relevant offerings, improve plan pricing, and build loyalty. Further, these insights help in creating targeted advertising to not only promote your own offerings but also for third-party sponsorship opportunities.

Innovations due to collaborations/partnerships

How does digital transformation help keep pace with competition from OTT services such as social media and chat platforms? Customers have far more engagement with these platforms as compared to traditional service providers, and digital transformation helps up the customer relationship game by forging cross-industry partnerships for a host of OTT services that directly engage the customer. Network modernization solutions enable these services to be integrated with the telco’s offerings, meaning that the telco can ensure end-to-end management of the services by maintaining control over them and providing a holistic customer experience. Transforming your network means creating new revenue streams by integrating a modern partner management solution that facilitates these partnerships while managing a large number of connections (think IoT ecosystem), massive amounts of data consumption, use cases requiring ultralow latency, and more. (For more on these partnerships as we move forward in the 5G era, read our blog, How partnerships are the key to 5G success for telcos.)

Agile and virtualized network environment

Digital transformation makes it possible to continually adapt to evolving market demands by responding swiftly with new and innovative services by creating an agile network environment. More agility means faster response time, helping telcos stay ahead of their competitors. An agile network environment is virtualized, replacing traditional hardware through the implementation of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and employing a software-based approach to running various traditional network functions. Modern BSS transformation solutions are NFV-compliant and cloud-native, helping telcos reduce operational costs, improve agility, lower OPEX, reduce costs by avoiding constant and expensive hardware upgrades, and support various next-gen use cases even before they fully transition to 5G. Earlier generations of networks, including 4G, did not serve as many use case demands as 5G. 5G caters to use cases that require more speed, latency, reliability, efficiency, throughput, and other needs. Catering to these dynamically changing needs, and handling more traffic load than ever before, demands a virtualized network environment. Taking a cue from the enterprise success of agile virtualized environments, more and more telcos are moving towards a virtualized core network. With more standardization as well as network-agnostic software, modern deployments are more agile.

Automated processes and faster sales conversions

Automating workflows and processes helps reduce operator dependence on staff, lowers the risk of errors caused by manual intervention, and helps keep operational costs low. Digital transformation integrates automation at all levels and in all processes. This includes automating sales processes to reduce workload, save time, and lower OPEX on creating workflows, sending emails, setting up alerts and notifications to track the sales pipeline, and more. It helps streamline the entire sales life cycle, centralizing all day-to-day operations, capturing leads, organizing customer databases, ensuring quotations are sent on time, interactions are prompt, and managing the sales pipeline. Here, too, leveraging data through the use of advanced analytics helps improve the sales process, forecast sales, identify the most lucrative lead sources, and more. The result: improved sales conversions, both in terms of time and volumes.

How Alepo can help in your digital transformation journey

Alepo been instrumental in digitalizing telecom businesses around the globe has emerged as an industry-leading solution provider to drive revenue through network modernization and digital transformation projects. Its next-gen products and solutions are the result of ongoing R&D efforts to employ the latest technologies and meet dynamically changing market demands.

Alepo’s 5G-ready Digital BSS along with its 5G Core and other cloud-native solutions helps CSPs constantly innovate their service offerings, facilitate business automation, accelerate network performance, drive profitability, and reduce costs on fixed and mobile broadband networks. Its 365x24x7 global technical assistance center (GTAC) further ensures that operators can maintain highly available networks, competitive differential advantage in their target market with timely feature enhancements, and a high customer satisfaction index with proactive network monitoring and quick issue resolution.

Looking to transform your service offerings, business processes, and customer experience? Drop us a message and we’ll get in touch.

Originally published on Alepo Blog.