Digital experience investment grows as CSPs focus on hyper-personalized customer service

Communications service providers (CSPs) are sharply increasing their investment in providing customers with omnichannel, connected digital experiences. Jean Lawrence, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Oracle, discussed in a recent interview why CSPs see improving B2B and B2C digital experience as an imperative, as well as the organizational and technical challenges they face. 1. How has the communications industry’s approach to digital experience changed in the last three years?

In recent years customers’ expectations have changed and the interaction experience has become as important as the underlying product. Accelerated by the pandemic, offering a compelling, personalized digital experience is now absolutely required for attracting customers. Historically, however, digital experience has not been a strong point for the communications industry as evidenced by how digital disruptors have used data, personalization and digital experiences to strip value from CSPs. Research undertaken by Omdia, for example, shows that CSPs’ share of the market for communications services fell from 73% to 49% between 2011 and 2019, while that of digital disrupters rose to 49%. This recognition has led to service providers significantly increasing investment in digital experience and focusing on digital journeys to detect signals and meet customers and prospects however and whenever they want to engage. A better digital experience depends on CSPs’ smart use of data to offer personalized, omnichannel, connected experiences based on deep insight into digital profiles and behavior rather than simply relying on customer IDs, addresses, or login details to recognize customers at disjointed stages in the journey. For example, I may start researching a product on an app, put something in a cart, and come back later on a website or even retail store, and I expect all my history to persist. For this reason, we are seeing CSPs implement unified sales catalogs, central asset mastering and persistent shopping carts to create a seamless handoff between channels for customers. 2. What are some of the technical challenges for CSPs as they improve their digital experience architectures? One of the biggest challenges CSPs face is ensuring that they can rapidly create and modify customer- and employee-facing experiences without impacting their mission critical systems of record, which handle everything from charging for service to fulfilling an order. Traditionally customer experience systems have been tightly coupled with underlying systems of record which are risky and expensive to change. This linked approach increased total cost of ownership and constrained innovation and time to market. Over-the-top competitors don’t face those limitations, so they are much more agile in rolling out new digital experiences. With today’s modern architectures, it is now possible to decouple the customer experience layer from the systems of record and allow each to evolve at their own pace. Most service providers operate in brownfield, heterogenous environments and benefit from a standardized approach that promotes interoperability with existing and future systems. That’s why at Oracle we architected our Digital Experience for Communications, DX4C, in alignment with the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture and Open APIs. In this way our customers can continue to get full value out of their existing systems of record while innovating at the experience level. Cloud native deployment is also helping to overcome traditional technical challenges for service providers. As a platinum member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Oracle has architected our OSS/BSS and digital experience portfolio to maximize scalability and agility and minimize operational complexity. By containerizing our software, we are aligning with our customers’ DevOps practices and enabling continuous integration and continuous delivery. 3. How has 5G started to impact what customers expect from their service providers, particularly in terms of real time experiences? It’s interesting to look at 5G impact in terms of both consumer and enterprise. Consumers appreciate benefits like quicker access to huge video files, but 5G has not fundamentally changed their interaction with their CSP. Some CSPs are starting to experiment with offering 5G consumer plans with the option to bundle services like cloud gaming that take advantage of 5G’s high speed and low latency. On the enterprise side it’s a richer story with interesting potential for service providers to engage in new ways with their business customers. Survey after survey shows that CSPs expect to generate much more of their 5G revenue on the B2B side, and that places many fresh demands on their systems. CSPs will need the ability to shift from “best efforts” to guaranteed levels of service. This requires the underlying OSS/BSS stack to have the tools to monetize new pricing levers and the closed-loop control to ensure quality of service and service level agreements are delivered as contracted. Network slicing is also an enabler on the enterprise side, and CSPs are exploring not just the technology but also what sort of experience they need to deliver: How does an enterprise learn about slice options that add value for their specific business, configure their attribute preferences with full visibility into pricing impacts, place and pay for the order, and then operate it with maximum automation? Enterprises have become used to the hyperscalers’ very simplified commercial experience, so it’ll be a challenge ahead for CSPs to provide a compelling digital experience – with high security – as they roll out 5G to the all-important enterprise segments. Real-time charging is an important expectation of service providers in 5G for both consumers and enterprises. CSPs must ensure their real time charging systems can scale to handle far more transactions in the 5G world than ever before. 4. How are CSPs changing their organizational structures so they can transform in ways that enhance digital experience? Organizational silos are being broken down by many CSPs. We see this happening between traditional department lines, as the chief information officer becomes an expert in customer journeys, the chief compliance officer takes on digital transformation, and software selection is shaped by the chief information officer, the chief technology officer, the chief digital officer, or the chief marketing officer. We also see the shift to cloud native and DevOps delivering much more agile ways of working, allowing businesses to react quickly to market dynamics and changes in customer expectations. At the same time, low code and no code application development environments make it possible to quickly build applications without any knowledge of software development languages. This gives CSPs’ customer-facing business units – who have a first-hand understanding of what enterprise customers need but lack software development skills – the power to rapidly create applications without depending on their IT departments. 5. As CSPs increasingly forge partnerships, including specialized industry verticals, what are the challenges and payoffs from a business and digital experience perspective? CSPs and other players recognize that no single company can provide all the pieces of the emerging rich service platforms. Partner ecosystems hold the potential to unleash many new business models and digital experiences and also place new requirements across OSS, BSS and digital experience systems. This involves designing and launching offers that mix CSPs’ own products with partners’ products and collateral, pushing those offers to run-time catalogs, and fueling digital marketing campaigns with personalized, relevant offers to drive sales. CSPs will then have to fulfill B2B2X orders for new and much more complex 5G service models. Managing order fulfillment in a highly dynamic, multi-sided and non-linear environment will require a whole new level of service orchestration and subsequent service assurance. Finally, revenue needs to be allocated and settled among partners in the ecosystem in alignment with contractual agreements. While some of this is uncharted territory for service providers, embracing multi-sided business models with partnerships will unlock the real revenue potential of 5G and enable exciting new digital experiences.