The telecom industry faces two major challenges: high costs and stagnant growth. Communications Service Providers (CSPs) must find innovative ways to enhance operational cost efficiency, especially as the core market for connectivity services experiences minimal growth. Simultaneously, they need to capitalise on emerging opportunities in high-growth segments such as Beyond Connectivity offerings for enterprises, which present a fivefold growth potential.
At MWC2025, Qvantel will showcase how its Qvantel Flex BSS with streamlined service offerings, empowers operators to achieve unprecedented Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) efficiency while driving growth in pivotal areas.
In November 2024, leading analyst firm IDC reported that “the global connectivity services market is expected to maintain a positive outlook over the next five years, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 2.0%”.
2% is below the rate of inflation in most countries, and so in real terms, telecoms connectivity revenues are shrinking. Every CSP needs to grow their revenues, and the clear industry strategy to kick start growth is to move to offer and sell beyond connectivity services. IDC highlight this in their report. They’re not alone. In their 2025 CSP trends, Omdia’s first trend was “CSPs are expanding beyond traditional connectivity services to tap into the $2.7 trillion B2B transformation market.” Other leading industry bodies and analysts such as Analysys Mason and McKinsey have been discussing about the need for beyond connectivity strategies for several years. The GSMA also highlighted that the enterprise tech solutions market is growing 5X faster than the core connectivity market, which highlighted the growth potential for CSPs.
To tap into the new beyond connectivity opportunities CSPs will need to update many of the legacy systems that they use to run their business. This is especially true in BSS, as many of the legacy stacks currently in use do not have the features and functions that are needed to support the move to beyond-connectivity services. This change presents another significant opportunity for CSPs. They can use the move to beyond connectivity and growth as a catalyst to significantly reduce their BSS costs by replacing old legacy systems, carrying out system consolidation and implementing a new BSS and operational models for rapid business velocity that supports the new opportunities.
By bringing BSS cost into the growth discussion, CSPs could see a significant reduction in BSS operational costs that would more than pay for the new system and enable CSPs to enter into the new beyond connectivity markets.
BSS Cost Efficiency Redefined
How much does BSS cost? There are software costs, infrastructure costs (cloud or / and on-premise equipment) as well as staff / operating costs. Plus, there’s the efficiency impact on the business functions such as customer care and sales that use BSS. Is BSS providing the right tools to ensure that they’re operating as efficiently and effectively as possible? Then there’s the cost of change. How much does a change to BSS cost and how long does it take? There’s also the cost of not quickly responding to market changes and new opportunities. What’s the opportunity cost for not launching a new offer or providing an enhanced customer care experience that will boost NPS because your BSS can’t support this process, and it will take the legacy vendor too many months to deliver the necessary change request?
At Qvantel we are redefining the total cost of ownership for BSS. We are driving efficiency improvements in several areas:
Full Stack BSS & Managed Services: As well as providing Qvantel Flex BSS we also provide cost-effective and expert managed services to run BSS for our customers and work with their teams. Our managed services teams support some of the world’s most innovative and successful operators. Our streamlined model providing a full end-to-end stack of Qvantel Flex BSS and managed services has been proven to significantly reduce the TCO of BSS.
Reduced Cost of Change: Using the no/low code design of Qvantel Flex BSS software changes can be implemented very quickly. Changes can me made using a GUI and be done by the CSPs’ own teams themselves or in partnership with Qvantel’s team. Using the Qvantel Flex approach our customers are delivering an unprecedented number of changes each year. This enables them to go from idea to production in a matter of days, thus delivering an accelerated time to market. Our Flex approach to software changes can provide up to an 80% efficiency boost when compared to the traditional legacy approach to software changes.
Increased BSS Efficiency with AI: Qvantel’s GenAI powered Flex Customer Care Copilot improves the performance of your customer care teams and will deliver a better care experience. Leading analyst firm McKinsey has forecast that AI can increase productivity by 15 - 40% and one of the areas where AI will deliver the most value is customer operations. This is a significant increase in efficiency and delivers real value to CSP.
Boosting CSP Growth and Innovation
Having the tools and flexibility to enable growth and innovation is essential. Enabling beyond connectivity services is one of the elements that Qvantel delivers to boost CSPs’ revenue growth. These include:
Powerful Full Stack BSS Platform: We provide a flexible, open platform with unique Qvantel Flex Framework & TM Forum Open APIs that is designed to support innovation and easily enable new offers and services to be launched. The no/low code configuration over customisation approach of Qvantel Flex BSS enables significant cost and time-to-market savings. It also enables experimentation with new ideas, processes and business models. As the cost of changes are low, then the fear (and high cost) of failure is removed. This helps CSPs create a culture of innovation where they are not afraid to try out new ideas.
Boosting Growth Beyond Connectivity: Qvantel Flex BSS contains the design and functions that enables CSPs to tap into growth potential in beyond connectivity offerings for enterprises. It provides the functions to enable CSPs to create, sell, deliver and service these new offers. These functions include e.g.:
- Flexible catalog for beyond connectivity offer creation
- B2B SFA (sales force automation) with advanced CPQ (configure price, quote) and dynamic pricing
- Catalog driven orchestration for offer bundles
- Delivery project management for complex B2B solutions
- Partner management for settlements and partner relationship management
Harnessing AI For Boosting Growth in Customer Operations (Care and Sales): There are many ways that Qvantel Flex Customer Care Copilot can improve customer care performance. While AI-driven chatbots can address an increasing part of customer needs on the spot, often customers still want to talk to a human. This is an important opportunity for delivering great customer service and upselling & cross-selling services for driving growth.
The next level of customer care service can be achieved with AI. An example could include AI-driven smart routing of the customer—based on sentiment analysis—to a suitable agent. AI can provide the agent with a smart briefing of the interaction history and customer intent, as well as provide ready-made suggestions for the response and next best actions. This enables the agent to excel and deliver the best service experience. This provides more upsell opportunities for agents, as well as a boost to NPS and customer satisfaction scores. Another example is smart use of AI Agent technology to automate appropriate customer engagement actions, when e.g. an issue is detected potentially impacting SLAs for enterprise clients.
Expert Managed Services: Qvantel has streamlined processes and teams of experts who manage BSS for CSPs. This enables CSPs to focus on running their business, secure in the knowledge that their BSS will quickly support new innovative ideas. This includes providing rapid change cycles for expansion and growth, to entering new business segments. In addition, Qvantel managed services provide business-based SLA/KPIs to ensure that CSPs can, in real-time, measure the success of new ventures, new offers, new campaigns and new processes and if required make changes to ensure success.
CSPs need to grow and it’s clear that beyond connectivity services present a significant opportunity to buck the trend of stagnation and kick start growth. While embracing this growth opportunity will require an overhaul of BSS for many CSPs this can also be a catalyst to redefine and significantly reduce BSS costs and increase operational efficiency with carefully streamlined managed services model. By looking at the BSS savings from implementing a new end to end stack as discussed above, then the new stack may well pay for itself in terms of efficiency savings when compared to the costs of existing legacy stacks. This provides the tools to enable CSPs to go after new growth opportunities and at the same time significantly reduce BSS costs.
At MWC 25 Qvantel will be showing how can help CSPs to redefine BSS cost efficiency and kick start new beyond connectivity growth opportunities. To meet up with the Qvantel team at MWC click here.
Jukka Heiska
CMO, Qvantel
