Winging it

Digital Enablement

Call To Sports — Jun 2018 by José Miguel Barros

A digital transformation is starting to revolutionize the telecommunications sector and overall the digital economy.

If CSPs want to keep their relevant role, they need to be prepared to fulfill sales and services orders with ease and fun.

CSPs marketers are constantly looking for new ideas to fight commoditization. They want to sell “over the top” services, more impulsively – in a simple, trustable and actionable way. They need to be creative and technology must facilitate it.

“Ready to Sell & Able to Buy” - the formula for context buying experience

Providing customers with this new class of buying experiences, a design principle of “digital enablement” must be supported on challenging architecture and processual attributes:

  • be actionable;
  • in real time;
  • flexible;
  • in context;
  • ready to fulfil;
  • providing Instant status;
  • assuring granted eligibility.

To provide a fair and secure impulsive buying experience, business needs to be empowered by a leaner offerings design:

  • Instant configuration: Product Managers configure and launch targeted offers based on pre-packed solution templates
  • Instant deploy: Commercial offers will be automatically available, displayed as an option on the customer self-service channel.
  • Instant access: Customers have access to offers in context, activating (buying) service extensions. Extensions can be activated manually or triggered by events, scheduled events, gift exchange, etc.
  • Instant control: Customers can purchase by impulse, confident that they can reconfigure or simply cancel these services anytime. Customers can also define usage limits, alerts or simply suspend the service.

The technology behind this experience needs to give end-customers control, displaying instantly feedback about what is happening; what can be done and what went wrong. This offering segment needs to be supported by simplicity:

  • Pre-packaged offers Catalogue: Only give access to what is appropriate for the customer’s lifecycle status: Add-ons, value added services, OTT, content, campaigns, etc.
  • Eligibility & Order templates: Each customer can only view offers which are eligible for purchase. In case of redundant subscribed services/tariff, some services may be temporarily suspended.
  • Fingertip buying Process (on-off): A service will be instantly activated as soon as a customer buys it (may require optional token confirmation). The “on/off” button status is the feedback required to monitor service activation.
  • Configurable any-time: Services can be monitored, modified, postponed, suspended or cancelled at any-time, through the customer’s self-service channel. This system provides roll-back and refund policies.

There are a number of creative offerings already delivered by some innovative CSPs around the world that illustrate these new digital trends. But in most cases, these offers still require too much effort and operational costs – something too risky to adopt.

The following examples illustrate what this “Digital Enablement” approach can provide to customers, delivering creative “over the top” offerings, without need to dismantle current infrastructures:

  • Customer subscribes to an 15GB, large data plan add on. The customer can cancel it at anytime and receive a refund for unused data. This feature is only available once a month.
  • Customer gives 1GB of data to a friend. When the friend activates the service, the customer gets 1GB too.
  • Customer subscribes to Mobile TV for the next evening (till 4:00AM), with no additional data charges.
  • Customer activates a temporary mobile service for the next 30 days using the same home family bundle conditions.
    Activation is done using a free SIM, received at the shopping center. Customers can only use this feature twice a year.
  • Customer subscribes to a marketing campaign, getting 100MB of extra data usage for each year of their contract.
  • Customer subscribes to a service that allows accumulation of unused monthly data, to be specifically consumed on-the-go, mobile VoD services.
  • Customer subscribes to a special Spotify + Data Bundle for the next 30 days. This campaign can be automatically renewed every month and cancelled anytime. No refunds available for this service.
  • Customer subscribes to a custom-made “fixed price” service that may be configured by customers at any time with service options such as data, voice, OTT, VoD, etc.
  • Customer is able to activate and cancel the subscription of third party services, such alerts, games access, information services at any time (for customers who want to control every item which appears on their invoice).

Celfocus currently owns technology, knowledge and skilled people to challenge CSPs to design, implement and deliver these new class of experiences; through their products CELFOCUS Omnichannel; CELFOCUS Order Management, in combination with a wide Integration and Customer Management assets.

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