The recent health crisis has highlighted why it is important for communications service providers (CSPs) to be “digital first” in terms of how they operate. However, like the Warren Buffet expression of only when the tide goes out do we find out who has not been wearing swimming trunks, the recent pandemic has provided a very public report card on the status of each provider’s digital readiness.
But what do we mean by digital readiness? It starts with identifying those experiences you wish to create for customers, partners and employees. This could be a smart home dashboard combining a variety of device monitoring and trending over fixed or mobile connectivity. It could also be a health care solution combining wearables bundled with similar connectivity – perhaps including components from ecosystem partners and sharing insights to those same partners as part of the overall offering.
Then CSPs must enable the rapid design and tailoring of those experiences without any tight coupling to the underlying business and operations systems as espoused by the TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture. Digital readiness also benefits greatly from the simplification, rationalization and standardization of offerings and flexibility. For instance, there must be flexibility to decouple what you are selling and how it gets bundled together regardless of the sales channel from how offerings are ultimately delivered, be it directly by the provider or indirectly by partners as part of a broader ecosystem.
The next step to support digital channels is to be truly available 24/7 so customers and prospects can engage on their terms with an experience that is responsive, fully featured and transparent. Finally, consider the underlying functionality needed to support this experience. In many cases we see providers initially only consider situations in which things go right, with terms like “minimum viable solution” mentioned to get to market quickly. However, it often means the harder things to address are pushed to later releases, sometimes never to arrive.
Let’s take the example of orchestrating slightly more complex customer orders such as consumer multi-play, small business and enterprise network orders. These are tricky enough to deliver properly today but looking ahead to the advent of 5G, service providers have the opportunity to co-create compelling propositions with partners in particular industries ranging from, for example, a telematics offering bringing together provider connectivity with an ecosystem of automotive vendors, dealers, insurance companies, etc. all the way to offering sophisticated application and network connectivity solutions to enterprises spanning providers, countries and regions. It will also enable service providers to drive or participate in ecosystems where delivering the customer proposition will include orchestrating components provided by multiple partners as well as the provider itself to the end customer.
To illustrate the point, consider a couple of scenarios drawn from experience of how two distinct service providers approached orchestrating enterprise orders. Each provider had identified the enterprise market as a key revenue growth area.
Approach 1:
Consider a CSP that opted to orchestrate such orders through entirely manual means, believing it was too difficult a problem to automate in the first place and their order volumes were relatively small, though growing considerably. It started to go wrong when sales sold “special” versions of standard products that required some custom design steps that were slow and inefficient.
Furthermore, lacking visibility into the order status, sales spent time chasing the back office for order details impacting sales productivity by up to 50 percent, not to mention trying to convey customer-requested changes to in-flight orders. Then, as parts of the customer order were completed, the end customer was able to use the service before billing was informed, creating revenue leakage. As this fallout occurred, ad-hoc downstream workarounds were enacted but not reflected back to the systems of record. Additionally, technicians were encouraged to up-sell customers when on site, creating further order changes.
The result was a situation in which the ordered products differed from those actually delivered and, most importantly, differed from what the end customer was being billed for. This led to customer bill disputes and further revenue erosion. Finally, in order to scale, more people were required to be trained and deployed – not the definition of digital readiness.
Approach 2:
The second provider projected a significant ramp up in enterprise and wholesale orders, especially after some acquisitions, and set about to standardize and automate not just the success flows but also the soft and hard error scenarios. They recognized that things can and do go wrong as part of normal business and designed the solution accordingly to manage them from the outset. This ensured full visibility, transparency and integrity of the customer order data across sales, delivery and billing at all points in the process.
How did they achieve this? They adopted a proven customer order orchestration approach that automatically supported the vast majority of order processing situations from the outset – creating a “fully viable solution” if you will. This included asset-based ordering for a move, add, change or disconnection of services (MACDs), dynamic determination of orchestration steps across all participating systems and partners, support for processing points of no return, inherent support for order revisions, stacking and cancellations through comparison and intelligent compensation. It also included multi-phase billing updates to ensure billing accuracy, with full order processing status visibility to all interested parties including upstream sales channels and the end customer. This also means businesses can start measuring traffic and billing for usage without waiting till the entire order is completed.
This approach enabled this provider to scale up their order volumes without any further human involvement and positioned their wholesale business to support connectivity backhaul for 4G and more importantly the coming 5G buildout.
Although there are many criteria to consider when looking to operate in a digital-first manner, simplification, automation and non-functional are easy themes to understand, even if still hard to implement. However, the growth of enterprise services, as well as the expected co-creation of B2B2X business models and the ecosystems enabled by 5G, means it’s a business imperative for service providers to be digitally ready. This starts and ends with ensuring that how they handle the customer order end-to-end is absolutely airtight and operates smoothly on sunny, cloudy and rainy days!
