Welcome to 2016 – a year where we feel a powerful wind of change blowing through the telco industry. January usually brings an avalanche of resolutions and predictions, but we’re also focusing on evolution and revolution – advances that will bring radical transformation and cost efficiencies to operators, and higher levels of service and satisfaction to their customers.
Through independent research projects we commissioned last year, we highlighted two key areas where operators can leverage their networks to better serve their subscribers and their bottom line, both worthy resolutions for 2016.
The first was research into future customer relationship management (CRM) trends, which highlighted a potential saving of up to $4.6 billion to Western European operators who implement streamlined ‘omni-channel’ CRM systems. These enable a consistent, accurate service to customers whether they enquire in-store, online, over the phone, via email, social media or through an operator-branded self-help app. The research delivered a strong business case, and this, coupled with the right tools, mean operators have the opportunity to bring true omni-channel architecture to their networks and evolve into true service providers.
The second project was a global operator survey designed to find out how operators ranked their own performance in monetizing customer data against that of the large Internet players such as Amazon and Google. With more than 60 per cent of operators admitting they were at least two years behind the online giants, this is another area ripe for evolution – or even revolution, with the help of the Veris Real-Time Intelligence Big Data solution, launched in 2015.
Partnerships were also big news in 2015, as our CEO Michael Wu noted in his November blog, with Cisco and Ericsson aiming to work together, Alcatel-Lucent and Nokia near to completing their merger, and our own JV with India’s Reliance making the headlines as we work together to create a next generation information technology software and services powerhouse to serve India and the surrounding region.
These research finding and partnerships point to boosting the operators’ top line and enhancing operational efficiency – a trend that is noted in the Northstream consultancy’s telco industry predictions for 2016. Northstream CEO and Founder Bengt Nordstrom elaborated on this trend in this blog – a thought-provoking piece, observing that: “to sustain margins and meet return on capital requirements, operators will have to look to implement initiatives that increase operational efficiency. More than ever before, this means transformational change in operating models, in organisational structure, and in the streamlining of processes and systems support to allow for responsive adaptions to changing market conditions and customer requirements.”
So what do we at AsiaInfo have in store for 2016? Well, you can be sure that we’re continuing to design and build solutions that are aimed squarely at enabling business innovation, that seek to release even greater potential from the network, and help operators further exploit the value of their customer data.
In the next couple of months we’ll be announcing our own initiatives to help operator evolution and revolution – driving superior customer experience, new business models, and even greater cost efficiencies. Watch this space. Happy New Year!
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