Analysis: I love it when an ecosystem comes together

Everybody agrees that customer loyalty is the answer. It seems that only now is there is agreement about what the question was.

Against the odds of internal politics, different cultures and empire building – and that is just within telcos – a step change is happening. The very survival of telcos as anything other than utilities is now actively debated. Vendors, analysts and journalists promote the excellent but fluffy concept of enhanced customer experience. The number of words written about customer data – the untapped gold mine of the telco community – would stretch from here to the moon. Probably.

A decent size telco can gather up to four billion network metrics an hour. Large IT transformations can take a year or so to justify and sign off, and up to two years to complete, with no guarantee of success. IT is frustrated with the rest of the operation and cannot seem to get the business to see the benefits of big transformations. Management is trapped by demands to cut costs while retaining or increasing dividends. Each department is measured by different criteria. Nothing, it seems, moves quickly…except customers.

Customers are canny, fickle and demanding. Once they understand a new technology, the take up can be dramatic. Mobile data usage is growing faster than even the most optimistic predictions because it is part of the lives of millions of people.

The initial reaction of telcos to the data explosion and resulting network congestion was to throttle their customers with caps and costs. This phase is passing, quickly, but frankly not quickly enough. The industry now understands that the age of relationship selling is here. The days when customers were about transactions are over; the days when customers can be ‘managed’ are also over. Customers may be kings, but relationships define the rules.

Tools are being developed and deployed that will increase a telco’s control of the network, understanding of the customer and containment of costs. Brought together this range of tools and techniques will pave the way for telcos to offer the next generation of services to a customer base that is, this time, waiting for the future. When telcos ‘built it’ a decade ago, no-one came. Now telcos are building to catch up with demand.

For the first time, it is possible to see the reality of personalized services, intuitive use of customer data and the logical expansion of business models into areas such as M2M, cloud service offerings and mobile money. This will place telcos and their new platforms in poll position to become the intelligent threads in a multitude of industries. The BSS and OSS capabilities developed and learned over the past two decades are about to pay dividends. Let the plethora of product announcements that allow telcos to be better prepared continue unabated.