Service Agility in Africa

By Ville Syrjänen, Director, Value Added Service Solutions, Tecnotree

Growing population, fast urbanisation and continuing fragmentation of local marketscharacterise the business landscape across Africa today. Digital services growth benefits directly from all of these trends. Expected to reach about 6% CAGR this year, it builds upon urbanisation and steady economic development. Furthermore, in many instances Africa is leapfrogging the ’industrial revolution‘ directly to a ‘digital services economy’. Such requires digital sales channels, appealing applications and content, and most importantly a local ecosystem in which the CSP should take a leading role. 

Most innovative CSPs in Africa already run ecosystems and use modern business models. For example, the revenue share model, which has proved successful in the applications business, can be applied to value added voices services too. In fact, value added voice services can offer chips for service differentiation and will increasingly be embedded in a context; one-click call to customer service from an online store is an example of such.

So what steps should CSPs take to further improve their position?

Clearly, the role models for success are the agile Internet players who innovate and launch services, concepts and trials at a rapid pace. For the CSPs this means cloud based models, partnering and joint market-making activities. As an example, RingbackTone service is a success in Asia and CSPs in Africa could use the same as a step towards content business. Another great example are video and social media services – success of which are proven by OTT players like Apple and Facebook – adding value to CSPs’ offering according to recent research.

Purely focusing on coverage, bandwidth and access will not give competitive advantage over peers who provide personalised service packages and delightful customer experiences. It is high time for CSPs to rethink their business models and make the transformation towards a digital marketplace which offers service bundles with content, applications, and telecom and Internet services alike.

Don't We All Seek Great Bundles For a Great Price?

By Tatu Tahkokallio, Group Marketing Director, Tecnotree

With 4G mobile service just around the corner and unheard of high speeds and services for mobile and smartphone users on the horizon, mobile network operators are set to face soaring data traffic. A number of operators are currently making significant investment in network-capacity increases in the hope that data growth can offset the decline in mobile voice revenue and stabilize average revenue per user (ARPUs). When it comes to mobile commerce, it’s very much about necessity versus convenience, developing versus developed, but mobile commerce isn’t handset- or data-dependent, so how will it unfold around the world?

According to recent research by Informa Telecoms and Media, mobile data consumption is expected to increase tenfold by 2016. The company predicted in its Mobile Content and Applications Forecasts report that global mobile data traffic will grow from 3.89 trillion megabytes in 2011 to 39.75 trillion megabytes in 2016, amounting to a tenfold increase. By contrast, global mobile data revenues will grow from $325.8 billion in 2011 to $627.5 billion in 2016, amounting to a two-fold increase. But what does this all mean?

There is no denying the fact that the key driver behind the increase in mobile data consumption is very much driven by the rising usage of Internet-enabled mobile devices, but as we saw in Germany, a strong smartphone portfolio isn’t necessarily enough to instigate market growth. It wasn’t until data prices decreased that internet enabled mobile devices really took off.

Data consumption in the developing world is very much driven by the cost of Internet-enabled mobile devices. By the end of 2011, new figures from Deloitte’s Technology, Media and Telecommunications (TMT) practice put the number of sub-US$100 smartphones in the market at about 200 million, this figure is forecast to hit 500 million by the end of 2012.

Whilst data consumption is currently low in the developing world, there is growing demand for communication and information services and it’s only a matter of time before we see the sub-US$30 or maybe even sub-US$20. A larger smartphone adoption rate will mean people are able to access services that feature phones cannot handle. With data consumption still in its infancy in the developing world, the scope for app developers is massive; if businesses and financial institutions play their cards right and take note from the developed world there is huge potential to really penetrate the market in the developing world.

What’s clear is the success of mobile broadband is very much driven by price, be it handset or tariff. The same goes for bundled service packages where, according to research by mobileSQUARED, 42 percent of operators say that the primary reason behind customer demand is price, with only 6 percent of operators putting demand down to exclusivity. Developed or developing, it doesn’t matter what market you’re in, it all comes down to price. Unless you offer attractive pricing, data consumption will remain flat. The developed world may consume data in a different way, but at the end of the day we are all data hungry. It’s time for the operators to feed that hunger.

Operators Must Embrace Social Media

says Karl Whitelock, Frost & Sullivan, Stratecast

The telecom industry is on the periphery of entering a huge transitional period. Four years ago it was all about the user device evolution, better network technology and converging network technology, be it fixed line or mobile. Now in addition to those, as we see some parts of the world move from 2.5G to 3G and others to 4G, a whole new digital world is opening up – social media.

Although social media is already very much intertwined in our lives, we still don’t really know its full capability. Today, social media isn’t just driving the communications business, but due to its growing popularity amongst consumers and the capability for businesses to engage with their customers on a level that was not possible before, it’s driving business in every industry. Operators must pay attention to the fact that social media will give businesses the opportunity to reach out and actually connect with their audience. No stuffy corporate policies, real one-to-one relationships, putting their business directly in the customer’s shoes.

This trend means that operators must evolve and adapt more than ever before. In the past operators provided a very different experience depending on the customers’ tariff service. For example, contract customers would experience rich customer support, provided completely by the operator, whereas Pay-As-You-Go customers were typically left with little or no operator support. Now, operators are moving into a hybrid environment.

This transition is taking operators closer to their customer, allowing them to fully understand their needs and how their services can meet them. The traditional ways for gaining insight such as lengthy customer calls has often led to having frustrated customers who feel that they are not any closer to the service they want to receive or phoned up about. What many users are now doing is asking friends in the social environment. By using social networking and forums, users are able to get the answer to their question within seconds and without having to engage with the operator. What this means to service providers, as it means to businesses in all other industries, is they must start paying attention to the social media evolution.

If service providers are able to pay attention to the basic needs of the customer, if they can put themselves in the customers’ position and ask “what is it I want?”, they will be closer to the end user. When looking at areas such as mobile billing, operators must provide real-time billing, billing that engages with the user, billing that informs the user when they are nearing their data plan limit and billing that improves the concept of “bill shock”.

Any business, no matter what the industry, can no longer afford not to leverage social media when looking to engage with its customers and must make it a central part of its business strategy; however, the success of such strategies rest heavily on social media being leveraged in the right way, by having a presence that is both engaging and engaged.

Comfort and Content is King

By Tatu Tahkokallio, Group Marketing Director

A day doesn’t go by in the telco industry without hearing ‘Content is King’. It’s at the forefront of the operator’s mind and continues to shape their business. But as consumers become more and more demanding, so do their expectations. During 4Q11, mobileSQUARED surveyed 52 of the world’s leading operators to find out exactly what they thought and to understand how the industry can compete in a digital world. The results showed that the ‘Content King’ is about to get its Queen!

Though voice and text still provide the majority of revenue it can no longer be relied upon to maintain consumer interest. Operators must retain existing and attract new subscribers by extending their offering of telecom services with a range of digital goods, applications and content. According to the recent mobileSQUARED research, mobile payment services, video on demand (VOD) and cloud storage are the three most valuable content services that operators will offer customers over the next 3-5 years.

Operators need flexibility to serve different customer segments by creating a host of alternative services packages. 31 per cent of all operators said that they currently offer quad-play services (fixed telephony, mobile telephony, broadband and cable/internet TV). What’s interesting is that one third of all operators which do not currently offer quad-play said that they either want, or intend, to start offering these services in the next 3-5 years meaning that almost two thirds of operators will be offering quad-play communication bundles by 2017. The bundle is about to get bigger.

Operators also realise that they need to extend their offering to third-party products and services if they want to keep growing. According to operators, 85 per cent of operators now view a product catalogue as a commercial necessity, with the majority of operators believing that offering their own app store would bring no value. A unified product catalogue can provide a comprehensive solution for managing all products and services, and can help operators respond quickly to changing customer needs by supporting rapid creation and deployment of new service offerings and bundles.

Almost half of all operators surveyed appreciate that the consumer wants all the content in one place, but their inflexible legacy systems hampered their ability to charge for different products and different services in one place.

Whatever way content is delivered, how consumers access and store the content will be where operators can differentiate and compete on delivering a comfortable, easy to use, one stop shop. Whilst content such as Skype, iMessage, Google Talk, Facebook Messages, WhatsApp and VOD could threaten to take the consumer further away from the operator, they must instead use it to stand out from the crowd. Content is still King, but content isn’t on its own anymore, it’s time to be joined by comfort and simplicity. Now it is certainly the case that ‘Content and Comfort is King’.

Please click here to view the full report.

Personalised User Experience - It's a Mind Game

By Timo Ahomäki, VP, Product Management

When a service provider wants to offer a personalised experience they need to look at the technology available, the processes required and, above all the attitude they project.

The most important ingredient in personalising the user experience is the service provider’s attitude manifested in the day-to-day interactions with customers. No matter how sophisticated the process or how modern the technology, if the customer feels that various rules are preventing them receiving the expected level of service, they will walk away dissatisfied. A smooth and flexible experience does not have to mean yielding to any and all customer wishes, but instead be prepared to discuss their needs or problems and pinpoint the most valuable solutions to them.

As we all are more than aware, customer care can prove to be a very hectic environment. To relieve this pressure – as well as to cut costs, of course – service providers are increasingly directing customers to web based self-care. This is mostly fine, as long as the customer actually gets what they were looking for from the website.

If not then they will need to go back to talking to a customer service representative, which is not ideal. At this stage we often find the process and information flow is broken and the problem solving has to start from square one. Worse still, the offers and services available through self-care are often not available for purchase via call centers, even if the information of the failed transaction was available. It is here where the process needs to be flexible enough to allow a customer service representative or a point-of-sale representative to finish the transaction started in self-care, or vice versa.

From a simplistic point of view, all of this is achievable by pushing out the offerings from the various lines of business across all delivery channels, and ensuring that all personnel are flexible in dealing with customers. The downside of this approach, however, is proliferation of random product and service combinations leading to increased complexity across service provider operations and, eventually lost revenue from subscribers then cherry picking only the most compelling offers. In order to prevent these pitfalls, the service provider must ensure all customer service channels share the same guidelines on the customer themselves and also around the service, including any recommendations or things to avoid.

A unified product catalogue consolidates all products and services for multiple lines of businesses, initially originating from disparate and fragmented product repositories. Such a consolidated overlay provides a single view to all product information such as price, distribution channel and product specifications as well as a flexible set of recommendation and exclusion rules for in-house and third party products and services alike. A unified product catalogue can be introduced as a big bang, replacing all the disparate product catalogues in one blow. Just as well, if not better, a unified product catalogue can be taken into use as an overlay to existing product catalogues where separate product catalogues continue to exist over a period of time and they merge into one only over a longer transition period. In the end of the day, unified product catalogue must facilitate faster time-to-market.

Unfortunately, faster is not always better if it does not also mean becoming smarter. Moving from paper to practise, the true test of any service provider’s ability to execute any given plan will be at the customer touch point, were it in point-of-sale, customer care or online. In order to make sure all the relevant information is available where it matters the most, service providers should be able to offer a full customer view and real-time service availability informa- tion to all customer touch points in equal measure, and apply this insight spiced up with predictive analytics also in real time, in any given customer touch point.

It is only at this point, when we start to see the possibilities of what it means to understand a customer for the benefit of personalisation and improved customer experience.

Anatomy of Classical Stovepipes

By Amol Kulkarni, Product Portfolio Manager, Tecnotree corporation

Volatility in the communications industry, especially in the last decade, has thrown in a myriad of prophesies around the future of traditional Communications Services Providers (CSPs). On one hand, the technology of conveniently staying connected has reached masses. On the other, the demand-driven, subscriptions-based business models of CSPs were taken to task by rapidly evolving alternate communication media. Then, there came the advent of social-and-ever-so-powerful consumer. This has entailed a paradigm shift for CSPs with the demands of future-driven operational constructs, which are lean, well lubricated and always on-their-toes.

Those who have to manage it often take the adage ‘Change is good’ with a pinch of salt. For the breath of fresh air and the prospective future it promises, it also brings the upheaval and tribulations should you struggle to manage that change. Just ask any CSP executive about changes they have faced over last few years in the way they do business. They would say they have seen it all. On the business front, they have come through monopoly, regulation, de-regulation, privatization, competition, globalization, liberalization, diversification, consolidation et al. The other key factor in their lifecycle flux being the evolution of communications technologies and its proliferation to the masses. The needs and expectations from the industry have evolved from convenience of a chosen few to irreplaceable necessity of one and all. The blurring lines among the communications, commerce and technology businesses then further compounded this. The motley of challenges and their resilience to fire fighting on multiple fronts has been such that you would most likely be rewarded for lending them a sympathetic ear.

The separation of the network-related organization (which powered the products and services) from the business and customer-facing set-up was an easy and convenient strategy CSPs had for a long time. This served them well as the BSS (Business Support Systems) and OSS (Operations Support Systems) in terms of technology stacks to run the businesses developed almost hand-in-glove. But as the communications technologies evolved to extend the proliferation and reach of services, customer-bases swelled and services bundling opportunities exploded. The priorities required putting the customers first in the value chain as it wasn’t a demand-driven market anymore.

A fast-forward to where the industry is today. With the evolution, complexities in terms of managing the business have grown exponentially. And in contrast, the slow pace of strategic, operational and systemic infrastructure development required to handle these complexities gave rise to some of the major silos. Industry jargons may classify them as silos, stovepipes, incidental or accidental architectures, or just the need-of-the-hour and just in time constructs as illustrated by this graphic:

They essentially represent the known restrictions CSPs have had in modelling and managing their business information and structuring the operations during the evolution.

Typical Silo	Highlights	Organizational Constructs
Customer	Segregation of business operations to cater to Retail (B2C), Business/ Corporate (B2B) and Wholesale (volume and virtual business) segments	Organizational processes to serve various customer segments are modelled as distinct business units
Services	Business operations are organized around the various services that these CSPs offer and the way they are delivered across customers	Business units typically represent the various service lines and delivery
Functions	Well-defined separation of functions, for example, strategy, customer-facing units, back-office units, network operations	Business units represent the classical BSS & OSS ecosystem, with strategy and management units influencing their integration
Operations	Represents the operational realities in the form of multi-geographical presence of CSPs, the ongoing M&A scenarios, intra and inter-operational partnerships	The core business units drive the geographical operations, merged entities, partnerships and logistical alignments
Channels	Provides a view of operations where efforts are made to reach the customer through a combination of channels	Business units perform cross-functional operations for each of the channels
Buzz	Typical overlay based on any of the above silos to cash-in on the new-age advents of operational and technology paradigms	The traditional business units get a make-over with an overlay based on the strategy adopted by the particular CSP

As it’s said, you learn forward and grow wise in the retrospect. Tecnotree’s experience of working through such stovepipes with our global customers has helped us envision our futuristic solutions portfolio. Through our Tecnotree Agility^TM solutions platform, we endeavour to empower the CSPs to successfully navigate through these silos and avoid the pitfalls of getting stuck into one. Our convergent Customer Lifecycle Management solution helps the CSPs put their customers in the forefront of the strategy as the evolution demands it.

We continue to strive hard and devise effective ways to enable CSPs to respond to the market demands and transition to the future.

Tapping on Customer Data

By Syeda Afjalina Wasi, Tecnotree CRM Business Analyst

In the competitive Telecom industry, innovation is an immaculate articulation of art and science. Needs today go beyond the traditional realms of solution scope and offering; focused and individually relevant offerings matter more and more. To create these offerings businesses rely on huge customer information sets maintained in large databases. Effectively managing and using such information has proved to be a challenge though.

In the dealings with our service provider customers, we’ve often heard problems of the following sort:

• “Our profitability hasn’t improved, although we have been acquiring new customers”
• “We had an extremely good product launch, initial adoptions were great, yet, customers didn’t stick to our products in long run”  
• “We want to bring back our old customers, but not sure how”
• “We understand losing a customer is expensive, yet we’ve not been able to check the churn”

Addressing such critical issues needs a much deeper penetration of customer information in the business processes. Such strong integration of customer information requires providing a unique view of customer to all the functions of business, commonly referred to as, 360 degrees view of customer. 360 degree view of customer allows the customer element to be part of the end to end process design of a business. 

Strategy – How well is the customer made a part of the corporate strategy? Conceptually, every business makes the customer central to the strategy of business. However, capturing the real essence of customer needs, and aligning the business processes around it is challenging. The old techniques of planning for customer-oriented design are obsolete; customer needs today are rapidly changing due to advent of new technologies. New communication devices, such as the modern mobile phones or tablet PCs are converging world around a person in one device. The thin line between professional and personal data is slowly diluting. Our previous blog on attitudinal analysis describes the aspect of reading customer behaviour and attitude in this new world. Attitudinal analysis can provide clues to creation of a sustainable strategy for CSPs.

Marketing – Sending the right brand message through the most relevant means is fundamental to an effective acquisition or retention of customers. 

• Marketing Insights – Customer data can provide valuable insights on how well a brand is received by customers. Providing deeper view into creation of the most relevant offers and promotions for the customers. In addition, good customer data analysis can also be determinant of what channels could be most effective means to promote the products and services.
• Build Loyalty – Customers’ demands are rapidly changing due to the new communication technologies, such as new generation mobile phones, tablet PCs etc. Current adoption of such technologies is also in the process changing the customer behaviour and demands. Building loyalty in such rapidly changing market is walking on thin ice. The only way to create loyalty in such market is to create offers pertinent to the current customer needs.
• Efficient Marketing – Analysing customer information can help in narrowing down the choices to the most effective segment and medium of conducting a marketing event. Hence, with targeted marketing, a company can perform the business with a much higher operational efficiency.

Sales – Selling effectively is fundamental to creating a long-term sales strategy. Rapidly changing market is forcing sales teams to sell products and services efficiently before the market renders them obsolete. In order to create a sales strategy, which sustains longer in the market, sales groups need to consistently innovate their sales practices.

• Sell More effectively – Sell Smarter is the new slogan. Rapidly adapting sales strategy to changing needs of market, higher collaboration across the teams and immaculate execution are key to selling today. 
• Eliminate Surprises – Good analysis of customer data can help look into future, and hence prepare for the adversities and eliminate the surprises during the sales cycles.

Products – Creating right product mix is more than just looking at existing services and bundle them to create an extensive offering. Customers today do not want to see products, which are not relevant for them. They expect the CSPs to understand their needs and recommend the most effective product for them. This requires CSPs to design products with the flexibility to adopt to the market needs. 

Services – Services are key to retention of customers, more often than not customer churn due to ineffective services.

• Improve Customer Satisfaction – Give customers what they really need, and customer satisfaction index would improve automatically. Being proactive towards offering the right services could keep customer satisfied, which in turn also ensure loyalty.
• Increase Service Effectiveness – Creating focused areas which effectively offers customers the most optimal services can not only elevate customer satisfaction but also dramatically bring down operational costs.  

Pricing – Product and Service designers are always face this dilemma, if they price them too low, it would immediately affect profitability, if they price them too high customers could potentially move to competitors. Analysing customer data could provide the answer to this dilemma. Offerings can be optimally priced at the most convenient range for customers without affecting the profitability.

In conclusion, in order to create an effective business, the customer data must run through the entire system playing a decisive role in each decision. Only by deeply integrating customer information in the system, a sustainable business model can be created.