Telecom Digital Transformation
Written by Deepak Jain
What is Digital Transformation?
Digital Transformation is the adoption of digital technology across all levels and functions. This means acceptance of new technology, changes in organization structure and culture, and redesign fundamentals of customer journeys, and provides the best digital customer experience.
We all know the success of the telecom business begins and ends with customer experience. To provide a fully digital customer experience the Telecom industry needs to adopt digital transformation very fast.
TRADITIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEM
Customer engagement is of utmost importance to any telco and ideal digital engagement is not possible with traditional telecom systems — as indicated to an extent by low industry wide NPS scores. Automation, innovation in customer journeys, and agile methodology are just some ways organizations have adopted to overcome shortcomings of traditional telco systems.
Customers face challenges from the very beginning of their journey — the buying of a new SIM to eKYC, Activation, Plan selection, Port-in/Port-out, etc. Customers need to visit telco outlets for most purchases and for any network related issue they need to connect with the customer center through CALL/SMS. With the right tech stack and systems, digitizing telco customer journeys, touchpoints, and contact points can solve these challenges and also address problems of:
- High cost of managing operations
- Poor customer satisfaction.
- Low NPS and high customer churn.
FACT: As per McKinsey survey, companies with a larger array of digital offerings have higher customer satisfaction scores. Besides, such companies also manage to reduce the cost-to-serve for each customer by 20%-40%.
DIGITAL TELECOMMUNICATION SYSTEM
Today’s customer expectation is they need an interface that is easy to use and provide 24/7 services. The Circles.Life App is built to meet such customer expectations and deliver a true customer delighting digital experience, as indicated by our best in industry NPS* and CSAT* scores. Three key considerations which any telco needs to consider when building such Telco platforms:
- Customer experience
- Digital Operations and Culture
- Zero-Touch Network
- Customer experience
In today’s world, customers prefer end-to-end digital services. Mobile Apps are playing the biggest role in delivering such digital experiences. Figure below shows how a Telco mobile app provides multiple services at one place — including eKYC, Digital onboarding, Port-in/Port-out, Plan purchase, and bill payment.
FACT: As per Ericsson survey A one-day delay in acting about complaints decrease the 30% customer satisfaction.
Such apps also enable Telco's to offer and sell non-telco services to boost revenues and profits. Most of the companies sell mobile phones and Insurance through Mobile Apps and provide gamification experiences in-app to solve customer acquisition and retention problems.
AI-ML-based chatbots integrated to the platform, offer significant cost-saving and provide a seamless customer experience 24/7. Data science and Predictive analysis can be leveraged to forecast revenue, possible churn rates, network monitoring and help boost customer acquisition.
2. Digital Operation and Culture
On their journey of digital transformation, Telco's have automated network monitoring, billing, and product configuration, simplified IT operations such as deployment and testing, and optimized service request management for reduction of tickets.
“We can have all the bold ambitions. We can have all the bold goals. We can aspire to our new mission. But it’s only going to happen if we live our culture, if we teach culture” — Satya Nadella
Digital Culture is the way people interact with technology. It’s the relationship between humans and technology. The digital culture encourages employees to share ideas and implement new things and reinvent the existing model with advanced digital technology. And provide flexibility to employees to work from any geographical area without any boundaries.
Telco systems need 24/7 support on 365 days and companies are spending lots of money for operation support and network monitoring. AI-based network monitoring systems help to reduce manpower and a round clock alert system can help to identify issues before customer complaints and fix the issue. Robotic Process Automation is software technology being used to automate repetitive tasks and processes, enabling ease and agility for report generation, back-office tasks, as well as responding to customers.
3. Zero-Touch Network
Telco's add millions of customers every year and to meet the ever growing demand of their subscribers, telco systems and networks need to scale and grow at a matching pace.
The Zero-Touch Network plays a significant role in optimizing network performance and quality, plus it doesn’t require human intervention for day-to-day configurations and maintenance. Zero-touch networks are built using cloud infrastructure, AI (Artificial Intelligence), Software-Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV).
Cloud-based networks have shared resources, no dedicated hardware is required, and we can access them from anywhere.
SDN and NFV both are advanced technologies that are important for network flexibility, agility and boost the speed of both platform and product innovation. AI is playing a key role in zero-touch networks. It helps to identify network traffic and API load on systems to reduce outage of services, without human interaction.
Telco digital transformation can be done right by any telco which gets these three ingredients of the recipe right. Telcos get to serve a flexible, scalable network which offers seamless digital experiences as supported by platforms which minimize time to market of new services and offers best in-class customer experience.
About the author:
Deepak Jain is working as a Billing Analyst at Circles.Life and have 10+ years of experience in the Telecom domain catering to various needs of telecom operators. He has broad expertise in Billing, Product Catalog, Rating & Charging, O&M, supporting application users for different Telco platforms like Kenan Billing, Crestel Billing, and BRM Billing.
