The Intelligence Playbook for Communications Service Providers

Companies build trust when customers feel understood. And in order to understand customers, companies need to stop asking: How do we optimise our existing business? — and start asking: How do we put our customer in the center of our business? Imagine if a CSP increased their customer satisfaction score (CSAT) by 21% for their current customers. That would make a massive impact on their business.

The only way to ensure customer-centricity is to unlock data and make collaboration a top priority and, ultimately, a reality. After all, data is at the core of transformation.

The organisations that seize data-related opportunities see results. Most studies conclude the same thing: Companies that are more data-driven perform better on key business metrics like revenue growth, customer retention, and profitability.

The best way to approach unlocking data is to look at it as an opportunity to unify. This means implementing a lean tech stack at web scale using application programming interface (API) functionality to connect disparate systems. Unifying systems helps CSPs achieve a complete view of the customer.

While a 360-degree view of the customer is the goal, it’s often difficult to achieve. First, let’s define what we mean by a 360-degree view: It includes every customer interaction and preference that relates to a company — calls, page views, campaign interactions, event attendance, buying power, tech use, and more. Basically, anything and everything that helps to better serve, identify, and predict customer needs.

But once CSPs achieve a complete customer view, they have to know what comes next. Every customer interaction is an opportunity to sell more, build brand loyalty, and increase customer satisfaction. So start with one customer touchpoint, bring in stakeholders from all of the teams included in that touchpoint, and design ways to improve it using the single source of customer truth — from start to finish.

Then, ensure every employee feels integral to the process. Enable every department to share, collaborate, and deliver integrated experiences down to the most junior employees. Share goals and KPIs with peers outside your team — even those that don’t normally work together. Explore ways to help each other, encourage cross-functional collaboration, find goals worth sharing, and make that data actionable.

This unlocks the ability to understand what customers need, when they need it, and why. But CSPs can’t develop and implement this complete customer view without rethinking how they organise, access, and make use of their data.

Technology generates the reach and scale required to make customer-centricity an act of business.

To transition to a lean tech stack, CSPs need to replatform in the cloud, typically with global, hyperscale providers. This is where a rich ecosystem of developers are implementing agile, modular architectures that incorporate reusable data sets. The next step focuses on business processes — CSPs need an application programming interface (API) strategy that enables an extensible application network with massive reuse. Here, Salesforce focuses with a complete strategy around a business support systems (BSS) transformation:

1. Digital marketing and commerce
2. Customer relationship management (CRM)
3. Integration
4. Data

This strategy is critical to success because it:

• Consolidates the number of tools needed for a workforce
• Empowers employees closest to customers to deliver the right experiences at the right time
• Delivers insights, recommendations, and actions, not just data
• Makes customer data easily shareable
• Keeps the company flexible and connected in an age of APIs, IoT, and the platform economy

Plus, moving away from legacy technology debt has never been more important. The role of IT is quickly evolving — enabling teams to compose low- and no-code apps with agility and governance to improve customer outcomes. It also reveals cross- and up-sell opportunities that may have otherwise gone unnoticed and improves internal operations and metrics like average handle time (AHT), first contact resolution (FCR), and post-contact processing (PCP) by:

• Helping service teams tackle complex cases
• Enabling more streamlined business processes
• Decreasing margins of error
• All of these benefits help CSPs to work smarter, not harder.

Traditionally, organisations integrate data using custom point-to-point code. Custom code is the enemy of speed and agility — it breaks easily and creates bottlenecks because there are few people who understand it.

To effectively break down data silos and securely unlock data, APIs act as building blocks — wrapping various components (for example, inventory data or order status) so that they are easily discovered, understood, consumed, and secured. With API-led connectivity, different teams can easily access data and digital capabilities. They also give IT the tools to manage and secure the data at scale, increase organisation agility, and deliver connected experiences faster.

An effective API management platform helps CSPs by:

• Improving operational efficiency and enabling new market opportunities powered at web speed instead of brittle point-to-point approaches
• Unlocking data and processes from OSS/BSS to create consistent customer experiences across channels
• Accelerating new product and channel development by empowering external ecosystems (for example, the network of producers, consumers, products, and services in a marketplace)