This article was first published in The Fast Mode.
If 2021 was about digital transformation hitting adolescence but not quite maturity and 5G starting to tilt revenues upwards, then 2022 is going to see increased focus on the digitalisation of the customer experience through the start of hyper-personalisation activities.
Tied in with the rollout of SA 5G, we should see B2B and enterprise teams in CSPs invest in BSS capabilities to deliver better digital process to support B2B customers. SA 5G will also see a lot more activity around partnerships in CSPs, with open ecosystems being used by partners to build and manage their offers.
All of the above change will impact the BSS that CSPs use to manage customers and revenues, and CSPs will want more agility, more offers, the ability to easily support new business models and channels - and they’ll want these changes to be delivered quicker and more cost-effectively than before.
This is why we’re seeing the emergence of no-code in BSS, and the adoption rate of no-code is set to accelerate in 2022, not just in telecoms but across a range of industries that are undergoing digital transformation.
CSPs are growing the number of partners they have, which means more services to market and sell to their customer base. This combined with the move to web and app-based touchpoints and the need for CSPs’ apps to be simple, intuitive and easy to use is going to see hyper-personalisation for marketing of offers to website and apps.
CSPs will have a limited amount of a customer’s attention when marketing new offers so they’ve got to hit home. This means more personalised offers, triggered by customer context, recent behaviour and experience. As SA 5G evolves and CSPs have more channels (AR, VR) to market their own and their partners’ offers, this will further drive the need for CSPs to generate the right offer, to the right customer, in the right place at the right time.
This means many more offers and many more processes, which need to be built, tested and managed in BSS. It’s clear that legacy, change-request driven BSS will not be able to deliver this level of agility to enable hyper-personalisation, so we’ll see CSPs taking a close look at the agility of their BSS platforms.
Many CSPs are betting that they’ll see major revenue growth from business customers with the rollout of SA 5G. But if you go to the enterprise section of many CSPs’ websites there’s not the same digital experience as is standard for consumer services. Most business customers need to ring a call centre and talk to someone if they have a question or even want to buy something.
If B2B is going to be increasing in focus then there’s a good chance we’ll see more investment in BSS and providing a digital experience for business customers. Many service CSPs talk about growth in the B2B market and need to provide a digital-first service to deliver the best customer experience, which is all admirable, but try explaining that to a business customer who’s been on hold for 10 minutes waiting to get through to a call centre to ask a question about their bill.
In the past two years, there have been massive steps forward in telecoms software companies opening up their systems with APIs. As well as using APIs to quickly integrate with partners’ systems, we will soon see CSPs’ offering their partners access to their systems to manage their own services. For example, let’s say a gaming company has a partnership with a 5G service provider.
The CSP has a full digital BSS, and the gaming company is keen to develop subscription pricing models for its online gaming service. Could the CSP offer its partner (the gaming company) access to its digital BSS to let the gaming company manage their customer on-boarding, customer marketing and management, subscription billing, etc? Here the CSPs would be offering their partners BSSaaS - thus strengthening the partner relationship and potentially opening a new revenue stream.
We’re seeing more offers, more partners and more channels, but at the same time a need to simplify and personalise customer engagement. As discussed above, this is going to need hyper-personalisation - but the number of offers that have to be built, managed, maintained, and when applicable retired, is going to be vast.
As new channels and partnerships emerge the number of processes to support all these will be significant. This will mean continuous change to BSS and for this, the old change request driven model won’t work. CSPs need hyper-agility to support the new ways of running a business and delivering the best customer experience possible for each and every customer.
This requires a no-code approach to BSS where people in the CSPs’ business teams can use a GUI to develop, test and launch new offers and processes in hours, as opposed to months with the old vendor-led change request model.
Martin Morgan
Head of Digital Marketing