Digital Transformation in the Communications Market

Do any of these statements sound familiar?

• “My sales team spends more time managing manual back office and administrative tasks than they do selling.”
• “The internal approvals process creates a bottleneck in our B2B business.”
• “Unresolved service issues cause us to lose customers.”
• “I can’t see a customer’s full history, so they sometimes have to repeat information to me that they’ve discussed with someone else at the company.”
• “I waste time hunting around different places for product information.”
• “Our systems are complicated, so I waste time switching from one to another to find the information I need and place orders.”
• “We have a lot more order fallout than our competitors due to invalid orders being placed by our customers and salespeople.”

Disjointed processes lead to confusion and customer dissatisfaction. Time to digitally transform your business!?

Factors Driving Digital Transformation

Changes in the communications market, fast-paced innovation, increased customer demand for connectivity, and new technologies are driving CSPs to change the way they work. Let us look at some of the key factors driving digital transformation in more detail.

Deregulation

The communications industry shows an international trend toward deregulation, including the entrance of different verticals to the communications market. Deregulated communications markets are competitive and have lower barriers to entry than their regulated counterparts. Traditional CSPs now compete with CSPs from other industries. Businesses in these industries often have an established customer base which gives them a competitive advantage. Therefore, CSPs need to be more agile and innovative to compete successfully.

Customer Expectations

As shown in the main picture, customer expectations are changing, and this drives the need for digital transformation.?

Customers expect both reliability and personalisation in the latest products and services. They use multiple channels to gather information, to place orders, and to access customer service. They also expect to access information and services at any time and place. Keeping up with this always-connected customer means providing a consistent and positive experience. A digital-first approach includes the use of analytics and omni-channel real-time interactivity to provide a fast, reliable, personalised service for customers.

Rapidly Evolving Regulations and Technologies

The quick pace of technological change and the associated legislation to deal with these changes has often been a challenge for the telecommunications industry—and the pace of change is increasing. There’s a greater demand for fast, safe, reliable networks, applications, hardware, and services to support people working and learning from home, and generally communicating with each other remotely. Further upheaval lies ahead with new technologies such as 5G and Network as a Service (NaaS).

Digitally advanced CSPs are better positioned to deal with rapid change. This has driven other companies to look closer at ways to improve their processes through digitisation.

Product Complexity

Fifty years ago, you would discuss cycle times for communications products in years. Now, cycles can be a few months or weeks. Conversely, the process of developing, building, and deploying products is increasingly complex, as are the many laws and regulations in place to protect suppliers and consumers.

Keeping employees up to date with rapid and complex changes and ensuring that CSPs operate within the confines of the law is a time-consuming business. The time your company spends training salespeople and customer service teams on new products and processes is time they’re not building customer relationships. Misinformed employees can make mistakes, which can be expensive due to lawsuits, employee churn, and loss of business.

Successful digital transformation reduces training needs and complexity. It minimizes costly errors by consolidating data and providing consistent, guided support for both customers and employees. This includes navigating common activities, such as gathering quotes, placing orders, dealing with customer queries, and product development and deployment. Digital transformation also helps businesses by providing insights into data to better target growth areas.

Impacts of Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is an incremental process that takes place across all parts of the business.

?TM Forum’s Digital Maturity Model?is designed especially for CSPs working through digital transformation. The model outlines the steps to achieve digital maturity in six dimensions.

1. Customer experience: customer engagement, insights and behavior, and trust and perception of the organisation.
2. Business strategy: brand management, finance and investment, market intelligence and portfolio innovation.
3. Technology: connectivity, security, technology architecture, and emerging technologies.
4. Operations: agile change management, analytics, and process management.
5. Corporate culture: leadership, standards and governance, and employee enablement.
6. Data use: governance, engineering, and value realisation.

Obstacles to Digital Transformation

These common roadblocks can slow down your digital transformation journey.

• Legacy systems that are difficult to change or scale to suit new business requirements
• Organisational data silos that hamper collaboration
• Poor communication between operational teams and business teams
• A risk-averse culture in the organisation
• Lack of corporate vision for the path and goals of digital transformation
• Insufficient management capability or in-house talent to implement the transformation
• Underfunding of the project

Be aware of these roadblocks. Your Salesforce implementation team is experienced in dealing with these issues and will support you in reducing the risks they pose to the success of your transformation project.

Drivers of Success

Increase the success of your digital transformation with these key activities.

• Focus on 100% customer success.
• Drive a lean governance model.
• Reinforce business outcomes to keep your transformation program on track.
• Use a platform ecosystem to set up an Agile operating model with an emphasis on clicks not code.
• Build an executable business-outcome-driven transformation plan and validate and adapt this plan throughout the project.
• Take a whole-business approach involving strategy, people, process, culture, and technology.

Lastly, speak to an expert who has experienced transformation journey's in cross industries and multiple organisation.

Do let me know challenges you are facing today and what KPIs are driving your transformation journey.