Why the 5G B2B customer experience must evolve

What do enterprises want?

Enterprises have high hopes for 5G: they want and expect 5G to positively impact business outcomes with better insight, improved productivity levels, accelerated use of automation, better application performance and the ability to create new experiences for their own customers. A recent Omdia report Telco BSS: The 5G B2B CX challenge details these enterprise expectations (depicted below) along with the pragmatic path forward communication service providers (CSPs) must take to meet them.

We’re headed for an enterprise services explosion. 5G is a platform for innovation to target every industry vertical with offerings that go beyond connectivity alone. More and more different services across industry verticals mean more products to take to market and to take to revenue as fast as possible. Now, the focus is on finding the viable business opportunities among the thousands of potential use cases. Having the flexibility to experiment and fail fast without BSS bottlenecks slowing the innovation process down is critical.

Increasing customer satisfaction is the overarching aim of transformation initiatives for CSPs across the globe. Ensuring that telecom BSS   will support good customer experiences and smooth customer journeys features ever higher on the CSP transformation agenda. And while consumer customer experiences have progressed considerably over the past decade with impressive digital transformation efforts now bearing fruit, the enterprise / B2B customer experience has not evolved at the same pace. Now, the incentive to catch up is greater because we must also consider what’s different about 5G vs 4G and previous generations of mobile technology. Manual touchpoints present challenges in the B2B customer experience, these challenges will compound as newer 5G services are enabled and as network slicing becomes more common.

Without doubt, successful 5G monetization for business customers demands customer experience (CX) simplification, the agility to engage proactively, and intelligence to maximize revenue opportunities. We’re working side-by-side with our customers on the business and operational transformations not only on BSS, but also on OSS and core network, to achieve just that.

The 5G B2B customer experience must evolve

The BSS enabling enterprise offers need to support smooth, simple CX to successfully monetize new services. BSS must be able to support enterprise interactions and frictionless experiences with:

• Intuitive customer and partner engagement systems
• Catalog-driven approaches and exposure of catalog to partners
• Openness and accessibility, for business customers, partners and other integrated systems (including self-service and chatbots) using TMF’s standardized open APIs
• Personalization, prediction and targeting automated by powerful analytics and AI.

So, what is the best way to tackle this, to evolve the B2B 5G customer experience in a meaningful and useful way?  For starters, we need to double down our focus on B2B customer experiences in an engagement centric way. And this thinking should not be confined to the customer experience, because we must remember that partners will be co-creating services, offers and experiences with CSPs in the new telecom value chain.  Also, being attractive and easy to work with in the burgeoning ecosystem of partners for 5G applications, services and solutions demands simple, accessible partner management systems too. Are you ready and able to give them access to BSS systems to create offers, access APIs to build new value? It’s important to create an ecosystem where partners can participate, with BSS that enable ecosystem partners to come to the CSP network and add value on top, co-creating new services.

To manage customers, services and partners and to be truly engagement centric, what’s needed is:

• An end-to-end journey management system for B2B e.g., Ericsson Digital BSS Digital Experience Platform (DXP)
• A cloud-native microservices based architecture, allowing for business process flows, supporting contextual customer journeys across channels, guiding the CX throughout

The legacy alternative is full of the complexity that comes with siloed systems with different user interfaces (UI), different experiences and different dependencies on space / size etc. And now, more than ever as the range and volume of potential service offerings increase and 5G’s new value with new quality of experience (QoE) comes into play, we need to think about CX in the context of interactions with other parts of BSS or even other domains, e.g., catalog, order management, OSS and the network.

An automated catalog-driven architecture is our starting point

5G’s explosion of services will include a long tail of very different services. Experimentation is the way forward. To roll out many services – knowing only some will succeed – intensifies pressure on time to market, and time to revenue. It’s super important to be able to experiment quickly, easily and cheaply. Catalog-driven architectures underpin the agility needed to do this, providing a definite advantage by simplifying the workflows and reducing the effort to set up and maintain new products that enterprises can consume and activate.

To flexibly build, manage and sell offers and, more importantly, to rapidly create a lot of offers, across different channels, we need to automate (as much as possible) the offer creation process. The new volumes and range of services must also be manageable. ‘Smart relationships’ (an Ericsson feature supporting many relationship types in product catalog), supports the explosion of offers to market while avoiding an explosion of offers in the product catalog. And business users need to be able to set up and alter the elements that impact customer experience, easily.  This means the Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) interface must be intuitive enough for business users to proceed without extensive and time-consuming support from IT departments. Modelling new products in advance further enables innovation and experimentation in a safe, planned way.

Automating across the order to activation processes is even more important as 5G’s new range and scale of services comes into play. This is an area many of our customers have made great strides in, e.g. Telia established a common platform to deliver zero touch automation in the order to activation process across six countries.

Without catalog-driven approaches that are backed up with automation, it will be very difficult for CSPs to succeed and keep pace with the market.

We need to focus on simplification to improve CX for B2B

Ericsson Digital BSS investments in the catalog-driven approach are all about facilitating simplification.  What improves CX is an overall simplified BSS architecture, from network integration and charging up to channels and orchestration/fulfillment. Then enterprise will be able to swiftly browse new offers in any channel, make purchases easily and get all purchased services activated quickly. Speed matters too: reducing time to market and giving new service options to customers (driving revenues), reducing time to complete processes (driving out friction and cost) through more digitalization and intelligence, using cloud native architectures, prioritizing configuration over customization and establishing contextual awareness all contribute to improving the quality of interactions and experience.

The longer term goal of course includes the full transformation of both front and back end so that the network connection points are able to contribute to the overall customer experience from an activation, monetization and analytics perspective. Even if the back end of the telecom BSS architecture is not yet transformed, the CX can still move forward, the strategic focus is to transform the CX through the main customer journeys centered on:

• Digitalization
  • Open modular architecture
  • Pre-integrations/ TMF APIs
  • Digital & futuristic FEs
• Intelligence
  • Artificial intelligence
  • Machine learning
  • Natural language processing
• Cloud native
  • Microservices
  • Kubernetes
  • DevOps

Take a building block approach

Consider how each BSS component is connecting to other BSS components and work toward the end goal of ensuring the customer experience is achieved through configuration, not customization. Make connection points as robust as possible using open standardized APIs. Make centralized journey control/orchestration the end game.

The building blocks in the catalog, especially the service layer, help business users flexibly build and manage offers easily and will help bring that customer centric focus to customer journeys.

I recently discussed this entire topic and the findings in Omdia’s report Telco BSS: The 5G B2B CX challenge with Camille Mendler, Chief Analyst, Service Provider Enterprise and Chris Silberberg, Senior Analyst, Service Provider Operations & IT on a webinar hosted by Light Reading entitled  Unlock the $3.8 Trillion 5G B2B Opportunity With Better CX in BSS. Throughout the course of our conversation, we explored:

• What enterprises want from 5G
• Defining the 5G-ready BSS
• The self-service imperative
• How open APIs support new business models
• Revealing the value of real-time insights

The webinar available on demand if you’d like to hear our combined perspectives on the how B2B CX needs to evolve in the face of enterprise needs and the opportunities 5G presents.

Learn more

• Unlock the $3.8 Trillion 5G B2B Opportunity With Better CX in BSS
• Report: Omdia - Telco BSS: The 5G B2B CX challenge
• Blog: The 5 Secrets of 5G B2B customer experience success
• Report:  TM Forum - Is BSS ready to monetize enterprise 5G?
• Ebrief: Game Plan: BSS for 5G enterprise customer experience