How Telcos Can Stay Profitable In A Competitive Business Environment

by Buana Sari Digital Marketer

According to predictions made by Statista, the global telco market is projected to experience significant growth in 2023, with an anticipated expenditure of approximately USD 1.5 trillion worldwide. This reflects a 2.8 percent rise compared to the estimated expenditure for 2022. In today's era of flexible work arrangements, the dependability of telco services has become increasingly crucial, as businesses and governments acknowledge the significance of investing in telecoms to foster the digital economy.

The telecom industry, determined to maintain its resilience and profitability, is experiencing cut-throat competition, with multiple players vying for market share and consumer revenues. Telcos face the challenge of staying profitable amidst fierce competition, evolving technologies, and changing consumer demands.

As we enter the middle of 2023, telecom operators can take solace in their ability to weather the storm amidst geopolitical and economic uncertainties. However, many telcos are not adequately prepared to address the emerging risks that lie ahead. The current inflationary trends and affordability crisis is prompting customers to reconsider the value they receive for their expenses. According to the EY Global Decoding the Digital Home Study, 45 percent of households feel that they are paying more than necessary for telco services, while 44 percent believe that their telecom service provider fails to adequately guide them towards the most favorable deals.

The global telco industry faces a significant risk from Over-the-Top (OTT) services. OTT refers to the delivery of content, services, and applications over the internet, bypassing traditional telecom infrastructure. While OTT services have revolutionized the way people consume media and communicate, they also pose challenges to telecom operators. OTT services, such as streaming platforms and messaging apps, are offering similar functionalities to traditional telco services at lower costs or even for free. This has resulted in decline in telecom profitability as consumers switch to OTT alternatives, impacting their profitability.

In the current environment of rising inflation, it has become increasingly crucial for telcos to enhance efficiency, agility and profitability via adoption of new transformation technologies. However, according to the EY Tech Horizon Study, the adoption of new technologies for transformation by telcos is hindered by various forms of complexity.

Due to market saturation in consumer segments, numerous operators are placing greater emphasis on seizing lucrative SMB and enterprise business growth opportunities. However, this strategic shift has not yielded significant advantages so far. One of the reasons for this is the relatively slow adoption of breakthrough tools and technologies.

This article explores key strategies that telcos can adopt to not only survive but thrive profitably in today's competitive business environment :

1. Enhance Customer Experience

In a saturated market, providing an exceptional customer experience is crucial. Telcos should focus on offering personalized solutions, improving customer support, and ensuring seamless customer interactions across various touchpoints. By understanding customer needs and preferences, telcos can tailor their services to provide a superior experience, resulting in increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and ultimately, profitability.

Telcos have been spending millions of dollars on social media, email, IVR (Interactive voice response) and more such tech platforms expecting to offer superior customer experiences. However, outcomes have been unsatisfactory. Reports highlight that sixty percent of customers bypass IVR, and around eighty-three percent of interactions that begin with IVR end up as a direct conversation with a customer support agent.

Opting on new technology such as moLotus mobile video customer interaction platform goes a long way in enhancing customer experience and satisfaction with increase in revenues and profits. moLotus enables telcos to deliver personalized and interactive mobile video messages to their customers. They can use this platform to send customized offers, promotions, and updates based on individual preferences and needs. By providing tailored content, telcos can create a more engaging and relevant communication experience for their customers.

With moLotus, telcos can simplify the onboarding process for new customers by delivering informative and interactive videos. This helps customers quickly understand the features and benefits of their services, reducing confusion and enhancing satisfaction. Similarly, the platform can be utilized to provide proactive customer support through video messages, addressing common issues.

moLotus enables telcos to send timely service reminders and notifications to customers, ensuring they stay informed about billing cycles, plan renewals, or upcoming upgrades. This proactive approach helps customers avoid any disruptions in service and fosters a sense of care and attention from the telco.

Telcos can utilize moLotus to create interactive experiences for their customers using multiple response options including Call, Web Click, mgram, SMS, USSD, and more. They can design loyalty programs, contests, etc. to encourage participation and reward customers for their engagement. This not only strengthens customer loyalty but also enhances the overall brand experience. moLotus offers an effective channel for telcos to gather customer feedback and conduct surveys. They can embed surveys within the mobile video messages, allowing customers to provide their opinions and insights conveniently. This helps telcos understand customer preferences, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to enhance their offerings.

2. Embrace Digital Transformation

To stay ahead in the competitive landscape, telcos must embrace digital transformation. This involves using upcoming technologies such as artificial intelligence, moLotus, Internet of Things (IoT), and more. By harnessing these technologies, telcos can optimize operations, streamline processes, and gain valuable insights into customer behavior, enabling them to deliver targeted and personalized services. Digital transformation also opens new revenue streams through multiple customer process innovations.

Telcos are currently undergoing a significant period of revenue and profit escalation. However, the complexities and silos within their legacy customer and business processes impede their ability to innovate rapidly. To address this challenge, breakthrough technologies like moLotus are facilitating the swift transformation of the processes. By leveraging moLotus, telcos can drive high-margin revenues, improve efficiency, and achieve speed, agility, and cost savings, particularly through enterprise business initiatives and increased Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

moLotus plays a crucial role in driving digital transformation for telcos by enabling them to leverage their burgeoning data assets. With its advanced capabilities in data curation and analytics, the moLotus platform empowers organizations to extract maximum value from their data, fueling their transformational efforts.

moLotus is rapidly displacing traditional voice-based contact centers and sales processes by introducing automated mobile-based processes. These cost-effective transformation models have proven to be highly effective, generating more leads, providing instant offers, and facilitating swift sales closures for telco brands. With moLotus, digital customer acquisition models, such as mobile customer onboarding, ensure a systematic and sustainable influx of new customers. This technology enables telcos to streamline their operations, enhance efficiency, and achieve better outcomes in customer acquisition and sales processes.

The use of traditional tools and technologies was limited in meeting the diverse demands and requirements of different business models, unlike the comprehensive capabilities offered by moLotus today. The revolutionary moLotus transformation technology addresses the specific use cases and dynamic business models of telcos that require enhanced speed, reliability, low latency, efficiency, high throughput, and other critical needs.

Inspired by the success of agile business environments in the enterprise sector, an increasing number of telcos are embracing the cutting-edge transformation offered by moLotus. This shift enables telcos to unlock the benefits of improved agility, allowing them to avoid wasteful spending on cumbersome business processes and support next-generation business models, even before a full transition to 5G.

Telecom businesses are now capable of reducing costs by minimizing the number of employees involved in call center processes. They are leveraging the cost-cutting capabilities of moLotus to substantially reduce overhead expenses, including training, compliance, telemarketing, printing, and delivery costs. By automating and transforming various customer processes, telecom players can achieve considerable cost reductions.

Operators have enthusiastically adopted moLotus transformation models, which involve a radical and forward-looking redesign of their service operations. These models enable telcos to decrease costs by up to 30 percent while simultaneously enhancing service cycle times and accuracy.

3. Diversify Revenue Streams

Relying solely on traditional voice and data services may not be sufficient in the current competitive environment. Telcos should explore diversifying their revenue streams by venturing into new businesses, tapping the untapped markets or offering services like mobile advertising, increasing their market share and profitability.

Telcos can explore B2B opportunities by utilizing moLotus to provide innovative solutions to other industries and businesses. They can offer moLotus as a platform for customized mobile video messaging, customer engagement, and data analytics. This can create new revenue streams through partnerships and licensing arrangements with B2B clients. Telcos like Indosat Ooradoo Hutchinson have already delivered a handful of enterprise client use cases working with moLotus in Indonesia. iAds-MGram powered by moLotus is driving high-margin revenue generation enabling the delivery of outstanding mobile advertising services to enterprise customers across Indonesia. It is expected to go a long way in exponentiating the MNO’s enterprise revenues and profits this year.

Telcos have the opportunity to enhance their advertising revenues by leveraging mobile advertising tools such as moLotus, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, AdRoll, and others. These tools enable telcos to effectively reach their target audience and maximize advertising revenues and profits. Among these tools, moLotus stands out as a unique mobile advertising solution that caters to all types of mobile devices, ensuring wide reach and compatibility.

What sets moLotus apart is its exceptional accuracy in targeting the right buyers. Telcos can utilize moLotus to precisely target customers based on factors such as language, interests, location, demographics, and more. This level of targeting precision enhances flexibility and opens up avenues for generating additional revenue.

With the capabilities provided by moLotus and other mobile advertising tools, telcos are well-positioned to focus their advertising efforts on different locations worldwide. By strategically utilizing these tools, telcos can optimize their advertising strategies, engage with the right customers, and ultimately increase their advertising revenues.

With moLotus, telcos can promote their own products and services to their existing customer base. They can use personalized mobile video messages to showcase new offerings, upgrades, or bundled packages. By effectively cross-selling and upselling to their customers, telcos can increase their revenue per user and maximize their profit potential.

4. Enter Into Partnerships and Alliances

Telcos can enhance their revenues and profits by collaborating with adtech brands. These strategic partnerships allow telcos to offer comprehensive advertising solutions to subscribers and enterprise clients.

By pooling their expertise and resources, telcos can provide end-to-end advertising services, covering everything from ad creation to distribution and analytics. Moreover, telcos can explore cross-promotion opportunities with other brands, leveraging their networks and customer base to increase exposure and generate additional revenue.

To optimize their revenue and profit potential, telecom brands like Indosat Ooredoo Hutchinson, Vodafone, Celcom, Airtel, and others have established mutually beneficial partnerships with moLotus. By combining their resources and expertise, they have successfully developed innovative and compelling mobile advertising campaigns, effectively reaching a broader global audience. The moLotus mobile ad tech platform provides a ready-to-go solution, enabling telcos to kickstart their revenue generation process within a short span of three months.

5. Utilize Big Data

Telcos possess extensive data on their customers, networks, and operations, and they can harness the power of big data analytics to gain insights into various aspects such as customer behavior, network performance, and more. This valuable information can greatly contribute to enhancing their business revenues and profits.

Next-generation digital platforms like moLotus and Hadoop enable telcos to analyze data points and make predictions related to customer behavior, network usage, market demand, and other crucial factors. By doing so, telcos can proactively adjust their offerings to cater to the specific needs of their B2B clients. They can segment their enterprise customers based on usage patterns, create targeted mobile marketing campaigns, and deliver hyper-personalized services, thereby improving their ability to cater to their customer base effectively.

Telcos are leveraging moLotus as a big data tool to monitor and track enterprise revenue and performance, identify potential bottlenecks, and optimize advertising campaigns to meet the demands of their enterprise customers. This utilization helps improve the reliability and quality of service provided to enterprise customers. Additionally, moLotus's big data analytics capabilities enable telecom brands to capture and analyze real-time customer feedback, facilitating the identification of areas where their services can be enhanced for better service quality.

Overall, the adoption of big data analytics is on the rise within telcos, enabling them to gain deeper insights into their customers, optimize their services, and improve their top-line as well as bottom-line.

Conclusion

The telecommunications industry is highly competitive, but telcos can maintain profitability by adopting a customer-centric approach, embracing digital transformation, diversifying revenue streams, focusing on innovation, implementing effective technologies like moLotus, strengthening partnerships, and prioritizing big data. By leveraging these strategies, telcos can differentiate themselves, attract and retain customers, and ultimately thrive in today's dynamic and challenging business.