Seeing telco APIs through the customer’s eyes

Glyn Povah , Founder and Director of Global Product Development, Smart Digits at Telefónica Tech , is our guest author this week. In this issue, he shares his perspective on an important but often overlooked component of the telco API equation: the customer.

Our industry has talked a lot about telco APIs but usually from the perspective of what we have to offer. We tend not to talk as much about the demand side and how customers can actually benefit.

It is critical to have this conversation because we’ll only be able to monetize telco APIs by providing real value that elevates experiences. That means collaborating with the people and organizations we expect to use our services—not just building cool tech, putting it out into the market and hoping something sticks.

Co-creating with customers

When I started building APIs over ten years ago at O2 in the UK, these were truly pioneering efforts. That is, we built APIs for enterprises with problems to solve. Together, we believed their challenges could be addressed, at least in part, by telco APIs and insights.

The together part was key. We always co-created with customers to ensure our efforts aligned with real business problems.

Our first customer was MBNA, a leading UK credit card issuer eager to reduce fraud on card payments made abroad. The idea was to match payment location with real-time, subscriber permissioned, country-level mobile phone location at the time of the transaction.

We built a roaming location API, collaborating with MBNA's mobile technology partner, Brainstorm. MBNA successfully opted in 500,000 customers for a trial that proved to be a technology and business success.

We did it!

Yet, MBNA chose not to proceed with a commercial rollout.

The reason was simple: other UK operators did not have the same API service and MBNA wanted all of its customers to benefit equally.

Fair enough. I learned a hard lesson about the importance of API coverage and national or even global availability.

(And sidenote, the next co-creation—a SIM swap API—did succeed, with other UK operators quickly jumping on board.)

API supply side sees great momentum

GSMA’s Open Gateway framework that standardizes APIs for access by developers and cloud providers tackles the ubiquitous coverage challenge head on. We already see great momentum with an agreed CAMARA global roadmap and release schedule.

Open Gateway has created the operator will, investment and sausage machine for rapid API development and deployment on a global scale with strong coverage from operators. This makes it easier and faster than ever for new API concepts to go from whiteboard to deployed production service.

Deeply understanding real customer problems and solving them remains a critical component of the telco API value equation. This is why I believe we need to see more channel partners and customers directly co-creating with operators as part of the API concept development and specification phases. This includes fostering more of their participation within CAMARA.

Discovering use cases on the demand side

The telco API demand side is important because adoption tells us we’re delivering value to customers. Revenue follows.

When I talk about demand side, I mean customers using the APIs we develop in their orchestration, workflows and customer journeys. I mean having our APIs embedded into their IT stacks, software and applications to solve real business problems aligned with organizational KPIs or OKRs.

Those customer needs might be about reducing fraud, improving the customer experience, increasing conversion or enabling new product and service features that were previously not possible. While customer use cases like these may be horizontal (e.g., customer authentication), many others are industry or vertical specific. We only uncover them by working with channel partners and their customers directly.

Telco APIs, integrated into customer workflows and customer journeys must also deliver business outcomes, creating a cost benefit that can be measured by the customer.

Engaging customers with a very particular set of skills

Channeling my inner Liam Neeson from the movie “Taken,” I do believe use case discovery requires a “very particular set of skills” to be done successfully. No, not the skills required for tracking down criminals, but the ones needed to work successfully with customers to unlock value.

These skills are firstly about listening, innovating and observing.

We listen to customer problems and opportunities. Then we innovate, trying and failing, co-creating with partners and customers, business development and product development. Then we observe, ultimately mapping the customer use cases to telco capabilities. You don’t need to be a technologist to do that.

Telecom is a big industry and Open Gateway is a collaborative effort. We can and should learn about use cases from each other and our channel partners. Some will only apply in some markets or regions while others can be applied more globally. The more we pool and share this use case knowledge, the more the entire ecosystem will benefit.

Get out of the office!

We can all make assumptions about what customers want from us and why. Worst case, these assumptions are simply wrong. Best case, they are unproven and unvalidated.

The good news is that use case discovery and validation is simple: it involves getting out of the office and listening to customers. This is where the very particular set of skills can be applied, and assumptions can be validated (or not) and ideas developed.

I am usually surprised by what customers tell me about their business, challenges and opportunities. They often speak completely differently from us in telecom. Some of what they say is intuitive, but much is not.

Through this learning process, we can map our assets and capabilities via APIs to the customer problems and when the collaboration goes well, value is unlocked for everyone, especially our telco consumer customers. Win. Win. Win.

We’re not the only game in town

We do need to be careful not to get too caught up in our own hype.

APIs are simply a way to access capabilities through programmable interfaces. Telecom is not the only industry building new tech and APIs at global scale. You may have heard of a few Silicon Valley companies doing the same!

I have learned from experience that for many customers, perfect is the enemy of good. They want to solve problems, usually in the quickest, cheapest or most compliant way and will usually have quite a few alternative solutions to choose from. Some of these alternatives might be suboptimal from the telco perspective but the customer might select them anyway for speed, cost or data compliance reasons.

Take location, for example. A location verified by mobile phone networks could be a great thing since it can’t be spoofed. But for some customers, GPS might be good enough. Others, depending on the use case (e.g., IoT), may place a higher value on our network location services that integrate well into their products and solutions.

One way to stand out is to have a unique product or capability in the market that can’t be easily replicated by others. Offering access to unique capabilities only available from mobile (or fixed) networks (e.g., when a SIM has been swapped or a phone number recycled) is a good way to offer a unique market value proposition and differentiate from alternative solution providers.

Unlocking value for the whole ecosystem

Telecom is firing on all cylinders with the Open Gateway initiative and we are taking all the right steps. If we can develop and scale our “very particular set of skills” and maximize efforts to co-create with customers, I believe the sky is the limit to unlock value for the whole ecosystem—and the revenues that follow.

Mention Glyn Povah in the comments to start a conversation.