Is going omnichannel one of your pain points?

Ultimately, telcos need modern, MACH-based technology in order to deliver a true omnichannel commerce environment that integrates all business units and commerce channels to deliver consistency to customers across all touchpoints. It’s common knowledge that what consumers and businesses want from their communications providers are their transactions processing seamlessly across all channels – in other words, consumers want the same experience, product availability, pricing and quality of service regardless of whether they walk into a store, call customer service, go to a website, check an app or ask Alexa, Siri and Co. Not being able to provide this type of omnichannel experience is causing brands to drop customers and sales. Paradoxically, though telcos enable networking, connectivity and interactions across multiple channels, they are failing to do these things themselves. As a result, telcos are losing customers to emerging cloud-native communications service providers. While most telcos are diligently working to adapt their technology to meet changing consumer behavior, the majority are having difficulties implementing, and achieving, the significant transformation necessary to meet customer expectations. The reason is simple. How can outdated and restrictive platforms enable modern interactions? For telcos to compete in today’s digital economy, it’s high time that they step out of their comfort zones to make decisive, bold, sweeping organizational changes, starting with building a MACH-based commerce platform. Nothing else will deliver the functionality and flexibility they need for future growth. Let’s take a look at what MACH -- which stands for Microservices, API, Cloud and Headless -- means in practice and what it can do for a telco’s commerce. In combination, these four strategies work together perfectly in driving agility and enabling a fast time-to-market that can support evolving business needs. But more than that, MACH is an organizing principle. A mentality that the whole organization has to adopt. And a MACH mentality requires building out a business that continuously innovates on its brands and channels. AT&T is one such telco that made the leap to MACH and reaped the benefits. When the company obtained new media services, they needed to migrate to a more modern, agile architecture as their monolithic commerce platform was not built for omnichannel selling. With a MACH architecture, AT&T could support cross-platform and cross-brand selling, as well as have the agility to build and customize microservices to meet the needs of the business. For omnichannel selling, MACH is primed to enable shoppable moments across any touchpoint because it’s simply using the same backend and putting different UIs on top of it. So, whatever new touchpoint emerges, like 5G mobile networks, live streaming, virtual assistants, autonomous cars and the IoT, telcos can jump on board straight away, and start monetizing them with connection fees. Plus, customers will experience more powerful and consistent brand experiences that will drive up conversion rates. After all, customers who have excellent purchasing experiences will stay loyal to the brands that provide them.

• Microservices: Small, stand-alone applications that can be individually designed and deployed by dedicated teams. Building a network of these services enables flexible development and shorter release cycles.
• APIs: This is the glue that ties together two or more applications. APIs exchange data fast andin a structured way. This can be used by companies to integrate different solutions or communicate with smart devices.
• Cloud-native: Scalable hosting infrastructure provided by businesses such as Amazon, Google, or Microsoft. Instead of running and maintaining their own data centers, customers can access on-demand resources to run their applications.
• Headless: A headless solution comes without a graphical user interface (GUI) such as a standard shop frontend. It focuses purely on background processes and making data available to separate frontend applications.