Netcracker discusses technological needs of cable companies looking to grow into the enterprise space
The cable industry is changing – massive network footprints are being leveraged to offer cutting-edge residential services while tailoring more products and services to the lucrative enterprise space.
But, as this change builds momentum, a lot of traditional billing and management functions are becoming more complex. Simultaneously, volumes of customer data need to be properly utilized to create new revenue streams based on right-time offers and proactively address churn.
Paul Hughes, director of strategy for Netcracker, discussed the company’s view on these issues on the sidelines of the SCTE/IBSE Cable Tec Expo in Philadelphia last week.
“The cable industry certainly is going through I think a fairly significant transformation,” he told RCR Wireless News. “This is a fairly mature market. We’ve now reached that point where you now have, your traditional customer base is mature, they’re at risk of cutting the cord. They’ve certainly seen the opportunities to take advantage of over-the-top players or consume their content from other sources. The cable providers are certainly looking for ways to keep those customers loyal.”
Take a look at this interview with Hughes, where he further discusses how Multiple Service Operators and OTT companies can work to together, along with a number of issues around the move to all-internet protocol cable networks.
New IP services like bandwidth on demand and access to cloud platforms are big opportunities for MSOs, Hughes said. “The enterprise market really becomes a big opportunity,” he said. “It gets into a whole variety of new business opportunities, which at the same time also requires the extension of a lot of the core technology that they have.”
For instance, he explained that as more products and services are spun up, it’s important to have a unified product catalog “so you have a single view of all the products and services that you’re trying to offer to both a residential customer or a business customer.”
On the data side: “It becomes just as important to manage everything from an analytics perspective around customer management as well as areas like churn as well,” he said
Even more of a challenge is navigating this sea change while maintaining a singular focus on customer experience, which Hughes said “comes from the ability to offer the right services to the right customers at the right time, deliver the right price points, address their issues from a customer car perspective … [and] be proactive where possible. I think that’s something, from Netcracker’s perspective, something that we’re really working with our customers to help them on all aspects of that.”
