Technological trends 2021. The role and prospects of telecom operators
This article considers only those trends that have direct impact on the telecommunications market. Each trend refers to one of the key areas for digital business growth: enhancing customer experience, "working from anywhere" (regardless of location) and automation.
Enhancing customer experience
Trend
Internet of Behaviors (IoB) & Total experience
According to the Gartner analysts, business development is mainly driven by the human resources: employees, customers and partners. Therefore, an effective digital business requires the highest possible digitization of the processes that will enable employees to do their jobs with quality, customers to get services on time and securely, and partners — to build up transparent environment for their business activities.
IoB (Internet of behavior (IoB) involves collecting user data from multiple sources and further processing to manage all aspects of the organization: service sales, employee management and process improvement.
The perfect example of IoB programs is a discovery engine for selecting content or advertising of products according to the user's preferences, based on their social media behavior or search queries. The other example is the applications that alert subscribers to the risk of COVID-19 infection while being in an area visited by people with a confirmed diagnosis.
Telecom operators are in the forefront to collect user data and benefit from information about subscriber behavior for higher quality servicing and stimulating sales. Device users inevitably leave a "digital footprint" by adding to the knowledge of telecom operators and service providers about their behavior and preferences. This information helps telecom operators make effective decisions and improve their services. By enriching customer data, telecom operators continue growing and building up more accurate predictive models and offers based on collected user data.
Trend
Total experience is focused on refining customer and employee interactions in the virtual environment. In the Gartner's view, working on better Customer experience (CX) and Employee experience (EX) will give market players a strong competitive advantage and even will allow outdoing others in satisfaction indices.Popularization of IoB is driven by the technological progress, because it requires digitizing as many aspects of life as possible. This suggests the need to deploy 5G networks. The fifth-generation connectivity will elevate existing digital services and provide impetus to the widespread adoption of advanced technologies and concepts such as Network Slicing.
Network Slicing means slicing network resources thus allowing communication service providers to create virtual subnets with different characteristics on the physical infrastructure of a telecom operator.
Network Slicing enables real-time remote device management without delay. In synergy with 5G, this will open up new opportunities for transport management, epidemic prevention, health and environmental data monitoring, safety and more.
Today, the lack of real-time data transmission and timely responses impedes harnessing fully the IoB technology trend.
"Working from anywhere”
Trend
Anywhere Operations
Most companies faced obstacles in providing services to their clients due to the epidemiological situation in the world and restrictions on physical communication and movements. Interacting with partners has become even more complicated. Traditional ways of doing business are gone. To survive in the competitive market, one needs technologies that not only calm the situation, but also ensure growth.
"By the end of 2023, 40% of companies will use anywhere operations to optimize virtual and physical interactions with customers and employees," Gartner says.
The "anywhere operations” trend is aimed at eliminating the business impacts of COVID-19. It's all about quickly ensuring remote work for employees and moving physical customer service to the virtual environment.
How do telecom operators handle the task of migrating subscriber services to a virtual environment?
eSIM is an electronic SIM card that eliminates the need to move and visit the mobile operator's retail shop.
In terms of reliability, an electronic SIM card surpasses a physical SIM card that can be corrupted while installing it into a device. There is no difference between using an eSIM and a physical card. Even on the smartphone menu, it is displayed in the same way. The tangible benefit from using eSIMs is that it is much harder to hack or forge them.
Automation
Hyperautomation
The unstable economy and high competition impose their own requirements to telecom operators. Market players need to flexibly face any challenge, quickly isolate failures and deliver services to customers in a timely and high quality manner, regardless of their location. The solution is hyperautomation. This means automation of all processes that have not been automated yet. Remote working also speeds up automation. The rigid companies that are not focused on higher performance will be inevitably left behind.
So, the IT solution providers face with a wide range of challenges. In past times, vendors had to immerse deeply into all internal processes, regardless of location, to maintain telecom operators’ systems with high quality and safely. Now, high-load solutions require remote management not only by its provider, but also by the telecom operator's employees. For this purpose, closed IT circuits and solutions with simple GUI are used, helping one easily customize software and reuse best practices. The hybrid integration platform solutions, such as Bercut HIP, are becoming even more relevant as they enable telecom operators to integrate their systems and to build up their own products without the need for development.
Intelligent Composable Business
According to Gartner, an intelligent composable business is a highly transformable business that can be fully re-designed depending on the situation. Companies need to be flexible and responsive to make efficient decisions based on proven data.
Telecom operators take advantages of the Intelligent Composable Business approach when they predict user behavior scenarios based on Big Data. Various approaches are used to optimize the timing of effective decisions: introduction of flexible methods, new technological solutions and tools. This also leads to the demand for technology platforms with a ready set of tools for configuring system logic by business units.
The role of Bercut in telecom
Bercut not only keeps a close eye on the trends in the telecommunications industry, but also creates solutions that feature business process automation, customer experience enhancement and trouble-free operation anywhere in the world.
Yelena Kokshenina, a business analyst at Bercut: The impressive business case by Bercut is an ecosystem of services based on the Business Rules Engine platform (BRE) that reacts to subscriber behavior in real time. This solution allows you to collect data from different systems and set rules for reacting to predefined subscriber actions (events). For example, BRE can send a personal offer to a subscriber in a timely manner or automatically apply a relevant rule to resolve a problem. At the same time, a business user can change settings and perform A/B testing.
Additionally, we use low-code platforms that are designed to minimize manual coding and make automation of business processes easier. In this respect, the Bercut Hybrid Integration Platform (HIP), as already noted, is a good example. The HIP microservice architecture provides telecom operators with a ready-made set of tools for integration, development and testing of their own products.
Yelena Kokshenina, a business analyst at Bercut: The other interesting business case is the automatic prevention of subscriber's fraud. It has been implemented on the HIP at one of the Bercut’s partners. In the past, employees of the telecom operator used to block fraud requests manually. Since the installation, the HIP itself blocks frauds based on the predefined criteria and generates reports. Now, there is just one person involved in the process who sets the rules for fraud blocking.
