Why Digital and Cloud Is the New Battleground for CSPs

Let’s face it, communications service providers (CSPs) have never been big innovators. Although CSPs have progressed towards digitization, problems still persist, and COVID-19 further amplifies these gaps. Here, Mayank Choudhary, Director, Global Product Marketing at Oracle Communications, unpacks the key challenges and discusses how leaning into the cloud and digital experiences can help CSPs recapture the momentum in the post-COVID business landscape.  

The past few months have been a difficult time for people, governments, and businesses as COVID-19 has continued to impact countries around the globe. Some areas are finally emerging after its onslaught, while others are now dealing with the growing force of its impact.

The New Normal for CSPs: Digital and Cloud

The pandemic dramatically accelerated the move to digital as traditional channels are rendered inaccessible. Per Accenture’s reportOpens a new window 89% of customers found digital interactions were equal or better than previous in-person experiences. More customers across all demographics are getting accustomed to discovering, engaging and conducting business virtually. Digital table stakes have grown dramatically in just a few short months and are only expected to accelerate into the future.

With their retail stores shuttered, communications service providers (CSPs) have pivoted to digital and mobile channels to serve their customers. Digital experience has become a key battleground for CSPs as they look to meet customers’ expectations. 5G opportunities will further drive the need for data-driven experiences, business model experimentation, collaboration with partners to launch and sell offers, and providing care for bundled services.

These days, most of us are conducting our work from home, our children are learning from home and we are finding more home-based entertainment. This significantly heightens the importance of cloud-enabled characteristics such as:

• Security – to ensure your child’s Zoom isn’t bombed, your work data is secure and your personal time stays personal
• Scalability – to respond dynamically to sometimes unplanned peaks and valleys in demand for networks and applications.
• Reliability – to guarantee that the important business call or social call doesn’t drop at an inopportune time.

All of this drives the need for CSPs to take a holistic, data-driven approach and offer highly personalized, relevant, omnichannel experiences, enabled by the system(s) that can be consumed “as a service”, can scale based on demand, improve total cost of ownership (TCO) and are easily incorporated into existing IT landscapes.

Learn More: Mobile Cloud Solutions Can Keep Businesses in the Game

CSP Challenges

While CSPs have been moving towards digitization, challenges remain – and these are further exacerbated by COVID-19. CSPs want to undertake transformation at a business pace while immediately providing compelling, data-driven digital experiences.

1. The slow pace of deployment of engagement channels: With an explosive growth of new digital channels to support, customer engagement channels are evolving at a much faster pace than IT can accommodate. With existing models, each new channel deployment initiative requires massive IT effort resulting in delayed time to market. Simply adding trendy IT tools and technologies at the edges isolated from underlying business processes only adds to IT and business chaos.
2. Weak insights: With a variety of customer data dispersed across a multitude of front-and-back- office systems and lacking modern solutions for continuous data aggregation and upkeep, CSPs struggle to generate the required insights into customer behaviors and needs. Consequently, they are unable to predict and serve those needs as well as the data-centric digital natives can and end up losing customer mind and wallet share.
3. Lack of employee empowerment and productivity: With the rapid growth of remote work influenced by COVID-19, traditional ways of getting things done in close consultation with neighboring colleagues in an office setting have been disrupted. For example, business managers need clear and complete visibility across business processes such as product and offer launches, intelligent 360 views of the customer to provide true digital omnichannel customer care with comprehensive industry-specific processes for both assisted and unassisted channels.
4. Constrained Business and IT agility: The accelerating pace of business changes and customer expectations leave no room for a model that tightly couples business and IT. This is a particularly tough problem for CSPs as most of them have deeply entrenched, mission-critical systems of record tightly coupled with the engagement layer that handles massively complex problems at a very high scale.

Together these prevent the modern CSP from being able to meet customer expectations. This leads to lower customer acquisition rates, high cost to support customers, and high risk and costs to implement needed changes. We are well past the time for taking a piecemeal approach to adding digital capabilities. To succeed in today’s digital-first environment and deliver intelligent, personalized digital experiences CSPs must take a holistic, data-driven approach. This requires understanding and transforming the full customer journey and the key interconnections between experiences.

Learn More: Top 10 Communications Platform as a Service Companies in 2020

To thrive in this new normal, CSPs need to implement the solution(s) that:

• Enable them to launch offers in days instead of weeks and move to business instead of IT.
• Rapidly introduce new channels and support contextual channel hopping so prevalent across their customer base.
• Improve the efficiency of their engagement channels from process-driven to conversational, havea clear view of customers and turn care into commerce.
• De-risk their transformation with natural business user experiences, data mastering and single view for faster transformation projects.
• Are based on open standards-based APIs architecture that enables co-existence and better leveraging their existing mission-critical systems of record.
• Are cloud-native and can be consumed as ‘solutions as a service’ than having to purchase, implement, integrate and maintain several products and technologies, and easily scale in response to surges in demand while ensuring mission-critical security and reliability.

Savvy service providers recognize that there is no going back and will choose future-ready solutions that not only enable them to grow their business in the current environment but also set them up to unlock the value of 5G and other next-generation opportunities that will further accelerate the need for digital and the cloud.

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