It’s an exciting year for telecommunication services (telco) industry. Global data usage is on a steep climb, set to triple by 2027, with billions of dollars invested in network upgrades. At the same time, competition is heating up, with everyone from tech startups to retail giants jumping into wireless services.

Customers, too, are demanding quick, top-notch service and better experiences. The convergence of these factors has pushed traditional telcos to embrace digitisation and automation to reimagine growth, efficiency, and service quality.

What are telcos hoping to achieve from digital transformation?

A study by Forrester Consulting commissioned by EdgeVerve found that telcos are striving for operational efficiency and connectivity and exploring new technology operating models, prioritising speed and responsiveness. Their digital transformation agendas are characterised by a clear focus on enhancing customer experience (CX) through operational improvements, data-driven insights, and AI and other emerging technology integration.

Telcos are depending on digital transformation to:

Amplify operational strengths: Improve IT security and privacy, IT operating model performance, and efficient query resolution.
Become an insights-driven business: Unlock the potential of data and enhance intelligence and automation across IT and business processes.
Breakdown silos and build seamless connectivity: Connect strategic data and network silos, establish peer-to-peer networks and partner integrations, harness emerging technologies holistically rather than in isolated pockets, and drive business and IT synergies.
Achieve greater operational visibility and efficiency: Merge human insight with AI’s analytical prowess to drive straight-through processing and enhance customer experience (CX), operational efficiency, cost reduction, and risk mitigation.

What happens when telcos embrace digital at scale?

Telcos that are leading the digital charter are witnessing immense gains. Take the case of world’s leading telecom service provider whose contract enforcement teams were overwhelmed with a large volume of tower rental contracts. Heavy dependence on manual review of these contracts affected visibility, efficiency, and accuracy.

They automated the contract review process to identify, extract, and manage data from over 700,000+ contracts. The new platform processed contracts from upstream repositories- building a structured contract summary and enabling teams to exchange important information.

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The platform also assessed risk and flagged high-risk contracts, which augmented negotiation teams’ capability to make decisions that were favourable to the business. This helped the telco optimise rent and utilisation and minimise risk, saving them US$21 million while improving productivity by 60 per cent.

To the discerning leader, the gains from digital transformation success are obvious. However, despite their strong focus and informed intentions, many telecommunications services firms are struggling to drive strategic change with their digital transformation initiatives.

Forrester found that even after pouring over US$100 million annually into digital transformation, a staggering 86 per cent of telco firms struggle to cross the chasm between investment and impactful business outcomes. Few survey respondents could attribute their organisations’ transformation initiatives to any business value. Instead, they resulted in reduced productivity, efficiency, and customer outcomes.

What is holding back digital ROI in telecom?

While the intention to digitise and automate is clear, the execution often falls short. These initiatives often involve complex, long-term projects with a high risk of failure, particularly in today’s volatile market.

Most companies are unsure of where to start their digital journey. The lack of a cohesive digital experience (DX) framework only compounds the problem, making the already challenging issues of siloed operations and fragmented data and networks even more pronounced. Even coveted technologies like AI are unable to scale due to technology immaturity, security concerns, and user trust issues.

These challenges are only widening the divide between digital transformation leaders and laggards in the telco industry. Almost three-quarters of telco organisations are currently in the beginner or intermediate stage of connectivity. Most of these lack concrete execution plans or struggle with the high total cost of ownership and siloed organisational structures that stifle innovation and efficiency.

How can they overcome these challenges and achieve digital success?

Key Recommendations for digital success to optimise their digital processes toward effective outcomes telcos need to:

Build connectivity that drives a customer-centric tech strategy. Strategically align business and IT stakeholders on transformation priorities from the early stages. Ensure tools, systems, and metrics come together to build a connected enterprise.
Prioritise AI and automation capabilities that remain accountable to employee outcomes. Focus on AI and optimise automation tools and processes to drive more self-service at scale. This focus augments human potential and impacts employee productivity, and, ultimately, CX.
Embrace emerging technologies with clearly defined use cases. Define a set of use cases and map capabilities and outcomes to devise a clear strategy to prioritise the right emerging tech capabilities for business success.
Optimise partner ecosystems to drive accountability and efficiency while co-creating new approaches. Navigate the complexity of partner ecosystems with platforms that enable visibility and accountability- priming them for scale without hindering success.
Leverage a platform strategy that enables you to capture value through efficiencies, insights, and growth. Adopt a platform-based approach that builds the visibility required across internal and external ecosystems, drives the automation agenda to build efficiency, and provides insights for accountable decision-making.

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The platform-centric approach: A gateway to digital success

A platform-centric approach is emerging as a key enabler for enhancing operational resilience, addressing modernisation and efficiency challenges, and gaining a competitive edge. This strategy connects business, IT, and partner ecosystems, ensuring seamless interaction across systems, data, and processes.

A platform model also gives unparalleled flexibility to telcos by shifting development decisions from traditional build approaches to buy-to-customise or compose models. It enables organisations to minimise technical debt by easily replacing underutilised or expensive modular components.

For telcos looking to future-proof their business, a platform-based approach is key to laying the foundation for a digital ecosystem that not only streamlines integration and automation but also fosters intelligence across processes.

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