Like all industries, the digital tidal wave is quickly transforming the telecommunications industry. Thanks to digital, operators are witnessing an evolving customer journey and a significant shift in the way customers and operators engage. The customer journey is increasingly becoming multi-channel as customer interactions integrate physical, online, and mobile digital touch points throughout the purchasing journey. The reality is, technology is changing consumer behavior and the telecommunications industry is not immune to the disruption.
To keep pace with the changing behavior of consumers and the increasingly competitive and rapidly evolving market, telecommunications companies need to rethink and realign their business models and technologies to maximize on new opportunities while maintaining cost efficiencies and preventing customer churn. Telecommunication companies must create superior customer experiences and make the customer the focal point for everything they do. In other words telecommunications companies need to undergo a digital transformation.
Digital transformation entails the realignment of, or new investment in, technology and business models to effectively engage customers at every touch point in the customer experience lifecycle, according to Altimeter. Digital transformation impacts the entire organization, including people, processes and technology and addresses all of the various functions and operations.
For simplicity lets break this down into three areas: Front-end, back-end and advanced analytics.
Front-end: Delivering a seamless, personalized and multi-channel customer experience requires organizations to adapt their front-end components to provide a digital experience that cultivates and captivates the always-connected consumer. For telecommunications companies, upgrading their front-end capabilities can result in digital-driven value:
- Optimize Market Spend and Build Brand Equity: Redirect media investments to better reach their tech savvy target markets. In other words go to where the target customers are already engaging.
- Increase Revenues from New Digital Services: Utilize tools to help gain a better understanding of the digital consumer to help guide the development of new offers and content.
- Reduce Distribution Costs: Redirect sales toward the online channels to digitize retail business and provide a seamless, multi-channel experience to engage customers, deliver a superior experience and re-align resources.
- Deliver A Memorable Customer Experience: Provide multiple avenues for customer contact including a live chat feature that empowers customers, transitions customer care to online and reduces customer service costs. Provide the information customers when, where and how they want it.
Back-end: In a digital world, front-end applications need to be agile, flexible and easily modified – an impossible feat if they are tied to legacy, disparate back-end systems. It is imperative that back-end functions be transformed in conjunction with front-end capabilities in order to ensure a successful implementation across the enterprise. Furthermore, an increasingly complex business environment requires rapid response to ever-changing requirements and financial pressures. Back-end systems and processes that are fragmented, sub-optimized and non-integrated diminish responsiveness to changing markets and customers – putting the business at risk.
Advanced Analytics: Similar to organizations in other industries, telecommunications companies have access to a lot of data. The challenge is transforming this Big Data into meaningful and actionable insights to deliver value to their customers and ultimately their company. Leveraging advanced analytics to uncover data insights can provide operators with actionable information to:
- Determine who the potential churners are
- Refine their marketing approach
- Identify up-selling and cross-selling opportunities
- Convert prospects into customers
In the digital world, companies like Amazon are setting the standard for online customer experiences. The internet continues to be increasingly integrated into the shopper’s journey and with each interaction the customer’s digital footprint grows. Telecommunications companies need to leverage this data and ride the digital tidal wave to enable more targeted marketing, greater operational efficiency and superior customer experiences.
Perficient has been helping clients drive toward digital transformation for many years. We modernize the systems that create, deliver and sustain meaningful customer experiences, and ensure that the business is attuned to its most digitally savvy customers across the enterprise.
Let Perficient help you on your digital transformation journey by:
- Making the business case for digital transformation
- Aligning executive vision with business and IT roles
- Understanding where you are on your journey
- Crafting a vision that works for your company
- Defining customer experience strategy and goals
- Uncovering and managing technology gaps
- Combining tactical projects with the digital transformation strategic vision
To learn more about getting started with Digital Transformation download part one of our digital transformation guide series, Laying the Groundwork for Success. Be sure to check out our other valuable digital transformation guides and assets.
