By Sanjay Kumar, Industry Vice President, Communications & Media, Progress Software
 
Driving value from the customer relationship will always be key to maintaining profitability and growing the business. As telecoms providers fight to be the lead provider for each customer, delivering everything they need, it is becoming more and more important that systems run efficiently. You need the ability to turn new services on and off, with a single view of the customer that really works and displays information in real time. You can then respond to customer needs, whether that’s for an answer to a query with their bill, a faster connection or issues with the quality of their service.

With this in mind, there are ten areas that need to be in focus as service providers look to improve their infrastructure to meet their retail and business customers' demands:
 
1.    For OSS / BSS, managing the manager is key. Traditional business and operational support systems (OSS / BSS) will require systems to manage the systems. Most service providers have invested so much in their (OSS / BSS) infrastructure assets that they cannot be easily replaced and need an adapted layer to respond to real-time business demands and re-energise the existing (OSS / BSS) infrastructure’s value.
2.    You will predict problems before they come to light. Telco service providers will be able to predict when there is a potential issue that will affect customers – and correct it before it happens. The pre-emptive correction of problems before the customer knows they exist will become a key factor in differentiating service providers and improving the customer’s level of service.
3.    Loyalty program. Mobile service providers facing mounting competitive forces will have to build stronger relationships with their customers. They will need to provide customers with unique, interactive experiences to build stronger loyalty by tapping into customer call patterns and locations, correlating with customer preferences and providing value added services to customise each customer's experience in a unique way.
4.    Partly cloudy. As communication service providers head for the cloud, they will struggle with data interoperability between cloud and non-cloud environments. Operators will need advanced data transformation and adaptive technologies to take full advantage of cloud-based applications.
5.    Mind the gap. Operators will be increasingly trapped in the gap between customer expectations for flexibility and speed, and the limitations in existing OSS / BSS infrastructure. This will drive demand for new business user toolsets to overlay OSS / BSS, enabling service providers to respond and deploy new solutions faster.
6.    Bundle of joy. Service providers will break through the traditional dispersed approach to their product offerings to provide customers with a bundled, one-stop experience. To align with the customers' experiences, a responsive tool is needed to provide a single point of response to customer issues across all silos and domains.
7.    As the world turns. As global service providers increasingly cooperate to share infrastructure, new levels of B2B standards will be necessary. Standards including interface specifications will be rapidly built out and adopted by service providers in 2011, by region or mutually beneficial partnerships.
8.    On the move. Mobile access to payments, banking, insurance and entertainment will increasingly dominate traditional mobile phone offerings and increase the need for mobile broadband. Bundled offerings will involve partnering with other business ecosystems and will require enablement for rapidly changing customer offerings, solution components, and customer profiles across a complex partner ecosystem.
9.    Soup to nuts. The inexorable increase in outsourcing of core business and IT operations will force service providers to re-examine every aspect of B/OSS software management. From vendor proposals to software deployment to retiring multiple systems, operators will need clear visibility into the processes taking place at third party offshore sites to better measure the effectiveness of their outsourcing partners’ roles in their customers’ overall experience.
10. Services offering services. To further differentiate themselves competitively, communication service providers will enhance their managed service offerings for business customers. Operators will offer business customers services including IT data centre operations and other enhanced managed services, as well as the traditional telecom service offerings. Communication service providers will use their in-house experience in managing network and IT operations to further their service offerings and relationships with their business customers.

So, whether it’s thinking creatively about a loyalty programme or introducing real-time data analysis so that the company can inform customers of any network issues, not the other way round, each of these trends supports the move to drive more value from the customer relationship through enhanced customer experience – the central priority as businesses prepare for the future.