With today's customers demanding quicker and more personal experiences, telecoms have found themselves needing to have systems in place to match these demands. This means older or legacy BSS systems, which were not designed to cope with ever-expanding offers and products need to evolve.
In the past telecoms looking to transition would be faced with a lengthy and expensive process, one which also had a high failure rate. However, telcos realised that by incorporating agile methodologies into their business support systems they could become more agile, giving them a platform to launch and maintain new services and offerings.
By transforming their BBS, telecoms have been able to enjoy a number of benefits. These include;
With a leaner BBS architecture, service providers found they were able to reduce the time to market for new products or services. This allowed them to react quickly to market influences and to be able to react to the demands of their customers.
By consolidating their systems and introducing automation service providers could decrease their operations and IT infostructure costs. They could also increase their productivity outputs.
Consumers can both, directly and indirectly, reap the benefits of a service provider transforming a BSS. Directly they can enjoy smoother and quicker processes and customer support. Indirectly however Telcos can use BSS to develop and deploy personalised packages tailored to the individual user's needs and price points. From a telcos perspective having the ability to deploy tailored packages and offerings will help reduce customer churn.
While there are many benefits to embarking on a BSS transformation journey, it requires careful planning to ensure its success. BSS transformation isn’t as simple as upgrading a piece of IT software. Instead, it requires a holistic reinvention of an entire business strategy. Firstly you want to understand where the current defects in your existing system lie and how you expect the new system to alleviate these. Next, it's important to consider how legacy applications within your current BSS will interact with the new system and if needed what sort of interoperability will need to be constructed. Finally, you’ll need to enact a vigorous testing process, of both the new system and its security. By testing early you can be confident your system won't impact your customer's experience once activated and you're not in any way vulnerable to cyberattacks during or after the transition.
As we have mentioned, enacting a BSS transformation project has many benefits but, as with many transformation projects, it can also fail. There could be many reasons a transformation project might fail. One of these is a lack of definition. Many projects fail by not defining the scope they expect from their transformation project and how advanced they are expecting the system to be. To counter this service providers need to be clear on how exactly their new system will enable them to enhance their offering to create a lead on competitors. By defining this at the start providers can select only the applications needed to achieve this vision, instead of taking the costly “select all” approach. Similarly, Service Providers need to clearly define a realistic ROI for the transformation project, without this some projects, although successful, will be deemed a failure due to impossibly high ROI expectations. Although this seems obvious many transformation projects can fail due to project managers expect the new system to be deployed and delivering within a few months.
At Lifecycle, we have a wealth of experience in creating building and managing innovative and flexible BBS solutions that empower successful businesses. By keeping a future-ready design to our solutions we help our clients maintain a competitive edge and sustainable growth. You can talk to a member of our team to find out more about our BSS solution.