Over the past few years, telcos have come under pressure to identify new modes to add value to customers as traditional value pools deplete. This year, the telecom industry is geared to face new challenges and opportunities as the technological, regulatory, and competitive environments continue to evolve and change.
While augmenting network capacity by enabling wireless and fibre deployments to fulfil the demand for high-speed networks, telecom providers will also have to enhance the customer experience to remain relevant in this increasingly competitive market.
Some of the priorities for telecom providers in 2022 are:
Enhance customer experience
Industry surveys reveal that 56% of telecom operators rank enhancing customer experience as one of their top priorities for 2022. Research shows that 82% of telecom consumers would consider alternatives if they experience a poor customer journey. 27% of them would abandon the purchasing process entirely.
Telecom providers thus must identify ways to create more viable alternatives to deliver high-quality communication and internet services and identify opportunities to make new service and bundled service offerings.
Telecom players will have to identify how to redefine their interaction models and offer more Uber-like online experiences and also assess how they can leverage technologies such as AI, ML, Big Data, and analytics to redefine service delivery and enhance value capture models.
They also have to identify ways to continuously add value by streamlining new offerings to match an evolving voice market and support their customers with new models and technologies.
Adopting the managed services model
In 2022, telecom players will grow in their role of being business enablers. As the pandemic continues to influence the way people live and work, telecom players will have to identify ways to enable customer success by delivering end-to-end managed services.
Comprehensive managed services such as switch partitioning, geographically distributed switches with redundant connections to the Internet providers become important capabilities. That apart, burstable bandwidth and switch port usage flexibility, and the capacity to manage billing, accounting, credit monitoring, deal management, market management, dispute management, fraud control and usage alert, traffic report, and various other services are other essential capabilities to develop.
Routing optimization drives RoI
Telecom players have to look at optimizing revenues and plugging leaks to improve business outcomes. Establishing cost-efficient traffic routes, optimizing operations by efficiently routing voice traffic will be critical contributors of the same. Technologies such as AI and ML will emerge as enablers with deep analytics facilitating improved decision making.
Telecom players will have to leverage comprehensive technology solutions to make intelligent routing decisions and ensure improved call quality and the best rates. We cannot ignore the role of enabling technologies like AI and ML to drive greater efficiency for voice traffic and maximize the ROI.
Eliminating friction
Telecom players will have to eliminate friction from all customer and user interactions to accelerate growth. They have to gear up to support evolving customer needs and deliver elevated user experiences by providing world-class service.
Leveraging technologies such as API’s telecom players can integrate voice calling within applications and enable their clients to receive and control calls across global locations.
Telecom players have to also identify ways to build their virtual presence with geographically specific numbers and capably service their customers.
Rich Communication Messaging will need to rise
Telcom players will also have to enable businesses to upgrade from SMS to RCS especially as feature-rich messaging assumes the role of a new business driver. Much like proprietary messaging applications, RCS offers some rich features and allows compelling media exchanges. RCS is all geared to disrupt the world of business messaging by delivering a more compelling messaging experience.
The coming of 5G is further aiding the adoption of RCS messaging with 67.44% of online consumers located across Australia, Brazil, China, South Africa, the UK, and the US stating that they were already using a telco-based rich messaging service or would like to do so in the near future.
Telecom providers thus have to look at ways of upgrading their ecosystem by developing the right partnerships with aggregators, connectivity service providers and meeting the market demand for RCS.
Plug revenue leaks
As with every year, this year too, telecom players have to look for ways to plug revenue leaks and improve revenue opportunities by identifying new business opportunities, increasing their customer base, and improving brand recognition. Recent research shows that between 2020 -2024 telecom operators could be looking at revenue leaks amounting to an approximate $37.1 billion, or an annual average leakage of $7.69 billion to grey route traffic.
Adding new-age technology solutions powered by intelligent technologies such as AI thus become increasingly important for telecom providers. Plugging in big-data analytics with traditional messaging firewalls helps telcos identify fraudulent patterns faster. Implementing blocking rules will also become essential to reduce the time between fraud and fraud detection and improve the overall security posture.
Deploying deploy anti-fraud capabilities including data analytics, and 24/7 monitoring, reporting, and alerting also become crucial capabilities for telecom players this year.
In Conclusion
The international wholesale voice traffic is expected to exceed 1 trillion minutes by 2027. Along with VoIP networks, this is likely to fuel international wholesale voice carrier industry demand. While telecom players must capably fuel the growing demand for voice termination services and international roaming with the proliferation of the LTE network, they need to identify ways to amplify their network and infrastructure to enable new services, drive customer satisfaction, and capture new markets by stimulating market demands. Let us help you on your modernization journey to take on the new challenges of the new marketplace!