Investigate Digital Transformation in the Communications Market
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Define digital transformation.
- Outline three current challenges for CSPs.
Do any of these statements sound familiar?
- “My sales team spends more time managing manual back office and administrative tasks than they do selling.”
- “The internal approvals process creates a bottleneck in our B2B business.”
- “Unresolved service issues cause us to lose customers.”
- “I can’t see a customer’s full history, so they sometimes have to repeat information to me that they’ve discussed with someone else at the company.”
- “I waste time hunting around different places for product information.”
- “Our systems are complicated, so I waste time switching from one to another to find the information I need and place orders.”
- “We have a lot more order fallout than our competitors due to invalid orders being placed by our customers and salespeople.”
Disjointed processes lead to confusion and customer dissatisfaction. Time to digitally transform your business!
Factors Driving Digital Transformation
Changes in the communications market, fast-paced innovation, increased customer demand for connectivity, and new technologies are driving CSPs to change the way they work. Take a look at some of the key factors driving digital transformation in more detail.
Deregulation
The communications industry shows an international trend toward deregulation, including the entrance of different verticals to the communications market. Deregulated communications markets are competitive and have lower barriers to entry than their regulated counterparts. Traditional CSPs now compete with CSPs from other industries. Businesses in these industries often have an established customer base which gives them a competitive advantage. Therefore, CSPs need to be more agile and innovative to compete successfully.
Customer Expectations
As shown here, customer expectations are changing, and this drives the need for digital transformation.
Customers expect both reliability and personalization in the latest products and services. They use multiple channels to gather information, to place orders, and to access customer service. They also expect to access information and services at any time and place. Keeping up with this always-connected customer means providing a consistent and positive experience. A digital-first approach includes the use of analytics and omni-channel real-time interactivity to provide a fast, reliable, personalized service for customers.
Rapidly Evolving Regulations and Technologies
The quick pace of technological change and the associated legislation to deal with these changes has often been a challenge for the telecommunications industry—and the pace of change is increasing. There’s a greater demand for fast, safe, reliable networks, applications, hardware, and services to support people working and learning from home, and generally communicating with each other remotely. Further upheaval lies ahead with new technologies such as 5G and Network as a Service (NaaS).
Digitally advanced CSPs are better positioned to deal with rapid change. This has driven other companies to look closer at ways to improve their processes through digitization.
Product Complexity
Fifty years ago, you would discuss cycle times for communications products in years. Now, cycles can be a few months or weeks. Conversely, the process of developing, building, and deploying products is increasingly complex, as are the many laws and regulations in place to protect suppliers and consumers.
Keeping employees up to date with rapid and complex changes and ensuring that CSPs operate within the confines of the law is a time-consuming business. The time your company spends training salespeople and customer service teams on new products and processes is time they’re not building customer relationships. Misinformed employees can make mistakes, which can be expensive due to lawsuits, employee churn, and loss of business.
Successful digital transformation reduces training needs and complexity. It minimizes costly errors by consolidating data and providing consistent, guided support for both customers and employees. This includes navigating common activities, such as gathering quotes, placing orders, dealing with customer queries, and product development and deployment. Digital transformation also helps businesses by providing insights into data to better target growth areas.
Communications Industry Transformation 101
You’ve learned that CSPs who digitally transform improve their customer experience and become more competitive than those who don’t—but what is digital transformation?
As you take your digital transformation journey, you change both the structure and culture of your company. You integrate digital technology into all aspects of the business, focusing on creating exceptional customer satisfaction and providing value.
Once you complete your digital transformation, your company is digitally native. Here’s an example of what a digitally native company looks like.
Being digitally native means you're more adept and agile in adapting to technology disruptions, time-to-market pressures, and customer expectations.
Impacts of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is an incremental process that takes place across all parts of the business. Some parts are probably already further along the path than others. TM Forum’s Digital Maturity Model is designed especially for CSPs working through digital transformation. The model outlines the steps to achieve digital maturity in six dimensions.
- Customer experience: customer engagement, insights and behavior, and trust and perception of the organization.
- Business strategy: brand management, finance and investment, market intelligence and portfolio innovation.
- Technology: connectivity, security, technology architecture, and emerging technologies.
- Operations: agile change management, analytics, and process management.
- Corporate culture: leadership, standards and governance, and employee enablement.
- Data use: governance, engineering, and value realization.
Obstacles to Digital Transformation
These common roadblocks can slow down your digital transformation journey.
- Legacy systems that are difficult to change or scale to suit new business requirements
- Organizational data silos that hamper collaboration
- Poor communication between operational teams and business teams
- A risk-averse culture in the organization
- Lack of corporate vision for the path and goals of digital transformation
- Insufficient management capability or in-house talent to implement the transformation
- Underfunding of the project
Be aware of these roadblocks. Your Salesforce implementation team is experienced in dealing with these issues and will support you in reducing the risks they pose to the success of your transformation project.
Drivers of Success
Increase the success of your digital transformation with these key activities.
- Focus on 100% customer success.
- Drive a lean governance model.
- Reinforce business outcomes to keep your transformation program on track.
- Use a platform ecosystem to set up an Agile operating model with an emphasis on clicks not code.
- Build an executable business-outcome-driven transformation plan and validate and adapt this plan throughout the project.
- Take a whole-business approach involving strategy, people, process, culture, and technology.
You’ve learned about the types of suppliers, customers, and products in the telecommunications market. You’ve also learned about the challenges facing suppliers and why digital transformation is important.
Learn more about digital transformation, including the different approaches taken to achieve specific goals using the Communications Cloud, as part of Trailhead’s Get to Know Communications Cloud.