The following is an overview of the key challenges that the industry’s respective companies are currently facing as we begin 2016, as well as a brief description of how leading players are aiming to address them. While not comprehensive, the list serves to portray the scope of the difficulties as well as the opportunities that today’s telecoms companies must understand and account for:
Increasing Customer Demand
Telecoms customers are using more sophisticated applications and exchanging increasingly data-rich content that is resulting in a massive demand for more bandwidth, leading some providers to become overwhelmed as their network resources fail to keep up.
In order to address this insatiable appetite for bandwidth, leading telcos in 2016 are ensuring that their operations become smarter, not simply bigger. Expanding network resources to handle increasing customer demand is only part of the equation, and the optimising effects of principles like network convergence handle the other half. Network convergence is the efficient integration of all telecoms services offered by a provider: telephone, video and data communication modes that are all supported in a single network.
As the “Internet of things” evolves and more systems and devices become primed for integration, the convenience and flexibility offered by network convergence make it a highly desirable solution. However, this increasingly complex and integrated technological environment brings us in turn to our second key challenge:
Increasing Complexity fuels Greater Need for Unified Standards
The emergence and refinement of new telecoms technologies; cloud computing, M2M (Mobile to Mobile) platforms and countless other examples will continue to place greater demands on existing network resources. New types of traffic and data will continue to test telcos’ capabilities as the pace of technological evolution speeds up, presenting companies with an imperative: adapt or fall behind. This trend is being exacerbated by the increasing collaboration between traditional telco networking companies and technology providers such as Google, Apple, Amazon and Skype.
In order to avoid disastrous network overloads, incompatibility issues and a whole raft of other difficulties, telecommunications firms are driving for the development of more comprehensive unified standards of usage, to help ensure seamless operation across a multi-channel environment.
In turn, this will push the development of new service support platforms that allow for smooth sharing of information and interconnection of applications. Ultimately, telcos that can present their customers with a unified platform that allows them to seamlessly operate any and all of their preferred systems will be the ones who lead the market.
Leveraging Siloed Data
All telecommunications companies have access to increasingly vast quantities of customer usage data that can help them determine any given customer’s needs and how best to satisfy them. However, too much of this vital data is spread across a range of siloed systems such as CRM software, ERP systems, MDM applications, legacy systems, shadow systems and many more.
The integration of this data represents an ongoing challenge as it involves operational complications involving security, staff training (or retraining) legacy systems issues and so on. Despite the difficulties involved, leveraging siloed data is a critical task for telcos in 2016 as it will allow them to drive better and more consistent customer insight. In turn, they can put the necessary tools in the hands of their customer-facing service agents that will allow them to respond to their customers’ needs and queries, improving the company’s overall CEM culture in a sustained and ongoing fashion.
CEM Connect 