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‘Making the customer king’ is the theme of this year’s Carriers World meeting in London. Over three days senior executives from the global telecoms community will share their thoughts on how carriers can successfully fulfil the demands of wholesale, mobile, enterprise and residential customers. We spoke to Christopher Grahn, CEO of Ascade, who will be speaking on day one of the conference, about what he feels carriers need to do to become profitable.
As the world-leading provider of systems managing the wholesale business, Ascade are involved in improving the business performance of carriers on a day to day basis and are well placed to see how the industry is shaping up. “I think it is more positive than a few years ago, but carriers still have a lot of challenges to overcome with new technologies entering the marketplace and, of course, many of them are still not profitable considering the wholesale-related revenues and so they have to fight that battle as well”.
Understanding what the customer wants and based on that knowledge, segment the market and developing value propositions that is vital for carriers seeking to win this battle. Traditionally the buying process has been the starting point for carriers, who have then gone on to form service offerings based on this. To improve their business carriers need to turn this strategy around and put their customers’ perspective at the heart of their organisation and let this flow through to the way that they define and position products, buy termination capacity and route traffic.
Combined with greater customer segmentation, carriers also need to look at ways of reducing their costs and improving internal efficiency. Grahn sees automation as a pivotal tool in this - “carriers are far behind other industries in terms of automation. Now that they are moving into more real time operations it is going to be critical in cutting costs and increasing efficiency”.
Automation at an internal level allows businesses to use staff on higher value processes like setting business rules and conduct analyses instead of processing large amounts of data. Grahn also believes the Carrier Cockpit helps carriers manage their external relations. eCollaboration enables carriers to exchange information and work together in a much more effective way that will have a positive impact on the industry.
Spotting revenue leakage is also vital for carriers protecting their margins. Although US and Western European carriers in particular are getting better at minimising this, they still don’t identify it quickly enough. Ascade’s Carrier Cockpit alerts give out information when leakage is about to occur, rather than just allowing carriers to analyse the information afterwards. Another important factor is to fully understand how well the business is performing. Today most carriers cannot identify a correct margin on its products and services at any given time and as a result may experience margin drainage without noticing it. Through the Carrier Cockpit, the carriers can conduct true margin analysis, which is extremely valuable in helping carriers better analyse costs per call, per customer and per product – thereby helping to protect revenues.
Hear Christopher Grahn further discuss how carriers can make money on every minute, every call and successfully manage margins at 14.30 on Tuesday 20th September at Carriers World.
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