October 2023 | Globe Teleservice

Top Trends, Influences, and Technologies Driving Telecom Product Development

Today, almost every business can find at least one telecom product within their digital ecosystem. From voice call-enabled services to SMS authentication, they help companies elevate their digital experience significantly.

But, it’s noteworthy that the need for a communications solution has transformed over the years. To understand the trends driving telecom product development, it’s essential to granularly understand this evolved need.

Why Are the Demands From a Telecom Product Different Today from the Past?

Earlier, telecom companies were only seen from the perspective of a network provider building and maintaining the communication hardware. But fast forward to today, telecom companies are strategic partners. They enable businesses of all sizes to scale and succeed with their digital aspirations. In essence, they create the connectivity infrastructure needed to effectively exchange data and information in a digital environment.

Consumers today expect digital-first experiences for almost all their needs, from shopping to healthcare. As businesses expand, telecom products are at the forefront of driving meaningful connections between businesses and consumers.

Areas like customer onboarding, customer experience enhancement, security and authentication, etc. have been transformed significantly courtesy of modern telecom product development initiatives.

It is certain that at least one of the apps you use daily on your smartphone leverages an OTP mechanism via an SMS or a missed call. A telecom product realizes either of these authentication mechanisms. Similarly, there are several capabilities that a telecom product offers to businesses for managing their digital channels.

So, What Drives Telecom Product Development Today?

As we have seen, a telecom product serves as a fundamental building block of modern digital experiences for several businesses. Therefore, development initiatives should ideally incorporate the key traits that define digital experiences.

Let us explore the top four trends that telecom product development initiatives must make special note of:

Seamless Customer Experience

Studies show that 32% of customers would leave a brand after just one poor experience. While building a telecom product, the core ideology that powers every workflow should be to provide a great customer experience. This can be achieved by using customer centricity as a core element of every development initiative.

Speed of Services

Speed is a critical element of customer experience, but it deserves a special mention from a telecom perspective. Today, customers value time more than anything else. Studies show that customer loyalty will improve by over 2.4 times if their problems are solved quickly.

In that light, processes like user onboarding should not take too much time. They often rely on telecom solutions for KYC authentication and user validation. When such products are built, speed should be a major development criterion.

By using solutions that provide easy authentication and faster enablement of Digital KYC processes, businesses can accelerate their customer journey rapidly.

Secure Experiences

We have seen how seamless and fast customer experiences make for great traits in a product development initiative. Alongside them, security is another characteristic that can’t be ignored. As more digital services become enabled and managed through telecom services, it is critical to eliminate any vulnerabilities.

However, preventing fraud will be a major challenge for businesses as they seek to plug leaking revenue and protect customer interests. Therefore, products with anti-fraud intelligence and fraud prevention workflows will be key.

Continuous Innovation

Consumers love innovation in technology that serves them great experiences. This is probably why AI and machine learning have become so mainstream today. For telecom product development, the situation is no different.

Businesses would leverage telecom solutions that can accommodate innovative capabilities in the future. For this, they need to be built with inherent support for AI, ML, IoT, big data analytics, etc. This would allow businesses to build newer customer service innovations by leveraging the underlying telecom framework.

AI-powered customer interactions in the form of chatbots, fraud detection with AI, etc., are just some of the possibilities they can explore.

Wrapping Up

Telecom product development initiatives cannot be judged as a simple endeavor anymore. They hold strategic importance in pushing businesses to achieve better ROI from their digital investments. As such, selecting a solution would require end-to-end analysis of possibilities and potential it can unlock for a business.

Implementing a trusted communication solution for your business is vital, given that critical customer aspects like fraud prevention are on the line. This is where Globe Teleservices can make a huge difference. Our range of trusted solutions has been built to incorporate the latest market trends and innovations. They can undoubtedly propel your digital channels to new heights. Get in touch with us to know more.

Trends & Technologies Enabling User Authentication and Onboarding

As the world has gone digital, user authentication has become one of the most challenging areas in the customer journey. Many enterprises have been trying to simplify this important stage of the customer lifecycle. From simple passwords to more innovative techniques like A2P SMS and Flash Calls, the user authentication journey has started evolving significantly. But obviously, security and customer experience must go hand in hand if enterprises are to succeed in a digital-first world.

Why Has User Authentication Moved Away from Just Passwords?

Businesses are looking to out-do each other in delivering hassle-free experiences for their customers. But for this, every aspect, like verifying consumer authenticity, speed of service, secure transactions, data exchange, etc., needs to play well together.

A decade ago, passwords were the default trend for user authentication login. Mixing numbers or special characters and strict adherence to character length did the job quite easily.

But over the years, using passwords alone for user authentication has become a risky proposition for businesses. Studies show that 80% of data breaches are linked to bad practices used in password creation and management by users.

With faster internet speeds, consumers want to quickly dive into the action with minimal clicks and typing. This need for a faster, more secure, and intuitive user authentication experience has made passwords an obsolete entity. They are now on their way out of the good books of people.

The Shift in Trends

With password-based user authentication slowly disappearing from the limelight, businesses have been looking for a replacement. But it must be newer, safer, and, most importantly, intuitive in verifying customers.

Over 60% of the global internet population comes online from their smartphones. As a result, businesses are rapidly transforming their digital channels by launching dedicated smartphone apps. These apps leverage much of the underlying device’s network capabilities for various functions. This has led to the dawn of a new breed of innovative user authentication experiences.

Let us explore the top 3 trends that dominate the user authentication journey in modern enterprise applications.

Silent Authentication

Silent authentication is an excellent way for enterprises to simplify the user authentication login process, especially during account creation. It works by leveraging the user’s smartphone network.

The mobile operator will automatically verify the customer’s credentials based on the data connection used. Data available with the mobile operator’s customer data vault is matched against smartphone signals generated on the user’s established connection. This brings a great deal of convenience and added security to the user authentication journey. By eliminating the need for OTPs and textual password inputs, the chances of fraud are minimized and users have to worry less about its impact.

No customer response needed means there is no need to fear modern phishing or social engineering scams. Such scams usually trick people into revealing OTPs or verification texts. Contrarily, the above approach completes user authentication in seconds, with zero customer input. The only downside is that users must have a good data connection as silent authentication doesn’t work over Wi-Fi.

A2P SMS

Application-to-person messaging, or A2P SMS, is a common business messaging system used for user authentication today. It is a communication link between an application and a user’s device powered by the underlying mobile network.

Carriers globally treat A2P and P2P traffic differently, allowing businesses to use A2P to authenticate their customers safely. P2P messages may be screened and rejected by carriers owing to potential scams or safety threats.

A2P messages can be configured with the right tools to ensure a clear distinction. They can be used to deliver OTPs straight to the user device’s app interface. This allows automatic verification even if the user doesn’t open the text message containing the OTP. A2P is designed to work in a scenario where a user isn’t expected to reply to the text.

Flash Calls

Flash calls — yet another user authentication login method where customers don’t have to do anything. Flash calls make for the easiest verification system used today.

A customer is authenticated from their mobile phone by a missed call to a specific number allotted to the business. Any transactional activity, like signing up for the services, user validation, etc., is done by leveraging unique digital codes. The codes would be embedded in the incoming calls to the business’s flash call programmed number. These codes act as virtual passwords and instantaneously authenticate users without any additional input.

The biggest benefit of flash calls is that they automatically handle the entire process without causing any inconvenience for customers. The call is intercepted, the password processed, and the user is verified through a series of automated tasks. These tasks are handled by the flash call solution implemented. This is a great way to engage customers by reducing hassles in their app user journey.

Faster, Safer, and Seamless Is the Way Forward

The user authentication journey for modern digital enterprises considers speed, security, and ease of use as core metrics for success. Enterprises must find the right technology to:

Tap into consumer mobile networks
Carry out their authentication process seamlessly and accurately
Deliver risk free experiences faster
Build more efficient communication channels

This is where our suite of enterprise offerings in the user authentication space becomes a great option. Contact us to explore how our solutions powered by advanced analytics, AI, and more can redefine the user authentication journey. Talk to our experts to know more.

The Top 6 Telecom Challenges for Enterprises Working Across National Boundaries

‘Global operations’ is no longer an uncommon dream for companies but an absolute reality across the business world. And we can safely say that communication technology has been a major facilitator of this boundaryless marketplace. The telecom sector plays a key role in helping enterprises build global teams and serve their client base across geographies.

Operating globally opens up more opportunities to serve customers and access expansive talent pools. However, staying competitive can become challenging without the support of robust telecommunications systems that enable collaboration and empower communications.

Some of the key telecom challenges for enterprises that operate across national boundaries are:

1. Routing and Interconnection Challenges

Global business operations need smart voice connectivity across all geographies, as communication keeps all business departments in sync. However, this can become a challenge for enterprises. That’s because different countries mean different telecom operators. Businesses need access to top-notch routing services and interconnects to these operators.

International Virtual Numbers (IVNs) and International Toll-Free numbers also become non-negotiable here. They are facilitators of good customer service and deliver a local experience to customers for such enterprises.

All in all, the challenge arises in integrating voice solutions with multiple channels and ensuring smooth communications. Enterprises must enable customers and employees to make calls from anywhere to any location worldwide. That’s what drives competitiveness.

As such, they need the support of telecommunications voice solutions that provide:

Origin-based dynamic routing
Number handling
Low-Cost Best Quality Routing (LCBQR) services

2. Latency and Call Quality

The days of choppy call quality are thankfully behind us. Seamless, clear, crisp connectivity now drives business outcomes. Low latency in voice calls is, in fact, a business imperative for smooth communication. It drives collaboration and customer experiences in a global world.

While latency between 20 to 150 ms can be barely noticeable, anything in the range of 150 to 300 ms can impact and diminish call quality. There can be noticeable lags and interruptions. Overcrowded networks are often one of the main contributors to such latency.

Therefore, enterprises need reliable international voice solutions. These must provide international coverage and enable easier, faster, and low-latency connections.

3. Challenging Fraud Landscape

Call quality and performance cannot come at the expense of high costs or poor security. As the telecom fraud landscape becomes more sophisticated, enterprises need robust fraud prevention strategies.

They need to build capabilities to prevent fraudulent phone calls, interconnect scams, and international outbound attempts. Further, they have to ensure that the connectivity and performance of their telecommunications assets are not compromised.

4. Real-Time Analytics

Real-time analytics of telecom traffic and the use of new technologies are now becoming imperative for enterprises. This is especially true for those businesses with operations across national borders.

Technologies such as AI and ML are essential to detect fraudulent traffic activities in real-time using pattern analysis. Using intelligent profiling techniques, can also help enterprises take a more proactive stand in risk identification and fraud prevention.

5. High Costs

The cost of international calls can cause a significant dent in the company’s bottom line. With voice call rates increasing globally, enterprises with global operations must look at optimizing cost opportunities.

The telecom sector is constantly evolving, and along with call charges, interconnect charges are also increasing in several geographies. Besides, the sector across the globe offers different floor prices when it comes to floor traffic. This means that the cost of completing a single call can differ across locations and cause a significant dent in the profits.

Identifying cost optimization strategies is crucial for enterprises to contain costs while driving connectivity. The role of voice solutions increases here as they offer enterprises the capability to:

Make affordable international calls
Optimize costs associated with voice calling
Prevent the compromise on call quality or performance

6. Driving Customer Experience

Businesses today are competing on their capability to deliver exceptional customer experiences. One of the key factors influencing customer experience is the enterprises’ ability to deliver contextual and localized experiences. As such, they need to not only tailor product experiences but also deliver local experiences.

From the telecommunications standpoint, enterprises can do this by having local numbers that customers can dial to speak to company personnel. They can leverage telecom solutions to:

Keep up with on-demand customer requirements
Capably redirect calls to appropriate agents who can deliver the localized experience using intelligent IVR

Cloud-based omnichannel customer engagement solutions like CPaaS+ can further help in:

Engaging with customers over their preferred channels
Facilitating hyper-relevant and contextual interactions

All these capabilities influence business outcomes as they help enterprises:

Resolve issues faster
Deliver better customer experiences
Improve customer loyalty rates

The Bottom Line

Enterprises need the support of telecommunications solutions to build high-quality and long-lasting relationships with their customers. To that end, robust, comprehensive, and integrated voice platforms are essential for enhanced call quality and performance.

The right platform can offer the advanced interoperability that businesses need today. It can map out the best traffic routes while providing affordable and cost-effective intercarrier fees.

Apart from this, unified routing, advanced forecasting, in-depth analytics, and live quality assurance are also critical. These capabilities empower enterprises to remain competitive and profitable in a complex and global business landscape.

Interested in learning more about such telecommunications offerings and how they can help your business? Book a strategy call with our experts today!