Top Business Benefits of Digital Transformation for Telcos

by Buana Sari Digital Marketer

For the past decade, the telcos have been challenged by falling revenues from traditional services, the threat of OTT players, and customers’ shift towards a digital living. Most global telcos are reinventing themselves by offering new and differentiated services to their customers. Digital transformation is being seen as the focal point of this reinvention, empowering mobile operators to offer superior products and services via delivery channels preferred by customers. Moreover, it enables them to enhance efficiency by streamlining their processes, further increasing revenues with reduced costs.

It has been observed that any telco digital transformation is a massive undertaking. It requires considerable investment, in terms of resources including tools, time, and money. Operators take years to transform their infra and customer processes. The success of this undertaking depends on how judiciously telcos decide their investment destination.

A Boston Consulting Group (BCG) report reveals that only 22% of telcos have successfully executed a digital transformation initiative as a part of business strategy for the telecommunication industry. BCG's research further pointed out that telecom respondents rated the digital ecosystem and win-win partnership area as their fourth highest transformation priority. Telcos are therefore investing in new age transformation technologies like moLotus which has partnered with several telco brands across the globe; bringing disruption in telecom industry; focusing on creation of new revenue streams through real mobile advertising, digitization, knowledge transfers, subscriber monetization, and more. Telcos embracing transformation technologies have gained immediate benefits, boosting ARPU, maximizing EBITDA, and deriving maximum ROI.

The seemingly endless pandemic has further induced telcos in scaling digital transformation to a higher level. Customers have dramatically drifted toward mobile channels, and telcos have responded positively in turn. Several survey results confirm the rapid shift toward interacting with customers through mobile and digital channels. Survey respondents are more likely to prefer customer interactions that are digital in nature.

Experts who recommend a digital first strategy for telecom outline the following benefits of digital transformation for the telcos :

1. Large-scale Revenue Generation

There is a massive rise in the adoption of digital transformation across the telecom sector. The incumbent telcos are riding the wave achieving higher process efficiency, targeted reach, personalized customer services and quick interactions opening up new revenue streams. In 2020, the global telecom market size was valued at USD 1,657.7 billion and is expanding at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.4% from 2021 to 2028 (Source: Grand View Research).

Rising spending on the deployment of 5G infra due to the shift in customer preferences toward next-generation technologies like moLotus is one of the key factors driving the revenues.The other key revenue opportunities for telcos lie in subscriber data monetization and global scalability emerging from rapid growth of mobile usage across the globe and transformation technologies assisting them.

Studies suggest that moLotus breakthrough transformation has made revenue more achievable for telcos by adding technology to customer processes. They are operating more effectively and growing top-line without sacrificing bottom-line. The new technology is generating 100x ROI by uplifting ARPU by 2 to 4 percent for telcos in a span of just 3 months.

2. More Customer Acquisition

As digital transformation technology advances and becomes more prevalent, telcos have started to invest their time and resources into automating and transforming customer acquisition. These efforts bring them new revenues and reach new markets. To gain customers through mobile devices, telcos are working to improve their digital acquisition tactics through a variety of mobile transformation technologies. Moreover, large scale digital transformation in the telecom space is helping telcos with customer acquisition in a cost-effective manner.

Legacy customer acquisition processes for telcos used to be cumbersome involving extensive use of voice-based contact centers, manual lead generation & selling and manual customer onboarding. That said, pedestrian pace of acquisition activities and unjustified high cost of acquisition contributed to low bottom-lines and less ROIs.

Present times have been favorable for telcos with moLotus breakthrough transformation technology fast replacing voice-based contact centers and selling processes with automated mobile-based processes. These cost-effective transformation models resulted in more leads, instant offers & quick sales closures with efficiency for telco brands. moLotus empowered digital customer acquisition models like mobile customer onboarding ensures systematic and sustainable flow of new customers.

3. Faster Sales Conversions

Automating sales processes have helped reduce operator dependence on sales staff, lowers the risks caused by manual interventions, and helps to keep costs low.

Digital transformation integrates automation to sales processes reducing workload, saving time, and lower expenditure on creating sales workflows, sending emails, setting up alerts and notifications to track the sales pipeline, and more. Telcos have streamlined the entire sales life cycle, generating more leads, managing customer databases better, ensuring quotations are sent on time, prompt interactions, and managing the sales pipeline. The outcome has been better sales conversions in terms of time and volumes.

Transformation technologies like HubSpot, Marketo and moLotus have transformed and simplified sales processes infusing quicker conversions. Earlier telcos were experiencing low conversion rates due to the manual legacy processes like filling & document submission, contract renewals, reminders, etc. With the adoption of moLotus they are enjoying hassle-free processes with high conversions at huge scale and near zero cost per customer interaction.

Telco subscribers benefit from permission-based personalized moLotus messages with special offers and product information from leading telcos. The innovative and spam-free moLotus mobile advertising campaigns help telco marketers to attract more subscribers to their products and services by incorporating multiple customer interaction options in their campaigns, adding more context. No app to be downloaded or data charges levied on subscribers, therefore an unmatched customer experience.

4. Deep Data-driven insights

One of the biggest benefits of digital transformation is gaining access to deep data insights. These insights help in continually tracking the pulse of telco customers. Telecom players can modify not only their plans and offerings, but also their long-term business strategies and goals. Big telco brands are effectively using deep insights to improve ROI and revenue.

A next-gen digital transformation platforms like moLotus, Hadoop, etc. provide granular and customizable reports for advanced customer segmentation. Using the insights from these reports, telcos can create personalized and relevant offerings for customers together with improved plan pricing, and building customer loyalty.

Further, moLotus deep customer insights help in creating customized and scalable mobile advertising campaigns to not only promote your own offerings but also to measure customer satisfaction by capturing additional customer parameters.

5. Ensuring Speed & Agility

Digital transformation makes it possible for telcos to constantly adapt to changing customer demands by responding swiftly with new and innovative products and services. In other words, digital transformation creates an agile business environment. More agility adds to rapid customer response time, helping telecom players to stay ahead of their competitors.

Replacement of traditional business processes adds to agility and speed by employing an automated approach to running various business functions. Modern transformation technologies like moLotus, HubSpot, Social Pilot, etc. are helping telcos to improve agility by avoiding wasteful spending on cumbersome business processes, and support various next-gen business models even before they fully transition to 5G.

Traditional tools and technologies did not serve as many use case demands and business models as moLotus does today. The breakthrough moLotus transformation tech caters to use cases and dynamic telco business models that require more speed, reliability, latency, efficiency, throughput, and other needs.

Taking a cue from the enterprise success of agile business environments, more and more telcos are drifting towards cutting-edge moLotus transformations.

6. Cost Savings

Optimizing overall costs have a massive impact on profitability and ROI for telcos. A significant way to reduce business costs is by using new technologies. Cost minimization has become the top agenda for telcos, resulting in return enhancement.

With cost reduction becoming an inherent core competence for mobile operators, all eyes are on moLotus which is contributing significant cost minimization opportunities through automation and digitization of customer processes.

Telecom players are now better equipped to lower costs by reducing headcounts in call center processes. They are utilizing the cost-cutting potential of moLotus to bring down the overheads significantly, together with training, compliance, telemarketing, printing and delivery costs by automating and transforming various customer processes.

Operators have embraced moLotus transformation models - radical, future-back redesign of their service operations - enabling them to drive down costs (up to 30 percent) while improving service cycle times and accuracy.

7. Superior Customer Loyalty & Retention

A loyalty program is a tool that helps telecoms retain their customers by providing hyper-relevant rewards, benefits, extra services, and deals. A common challenge for telcos is high churn rate : once the deals are closed, no inherent customer loyalty is formed, and customers immediately look at other offers once their subscription is over. Telco loyalty programs are intended to combat this challenge.

For years telco loyalty programs have been characterized by lack of automation, customization, personalization and customer interaction efficiency. Most telco brands used app based marketing platforms like Shopkick, Spendgo, Smile.io, etc. for running customer loyalty & rewards campaigns with almost no success.

To overcome the challenges of the industry and better customer retention, telcos are fast embracing moLotus transformation technology. The technology has revolutionized customer support systems for delighting speed and convenience-driven customers. Telecoms can now serve their customers on mobile devices with moLotus. The tech platform provides hyper-personalized and interactive communication for events, digital rewards, reminders, mobile loyalty cards, real time customer ratings, FAQs, how-to, feedback via mobile, and many more.

8. Reimagine Customer Engagement

To create and scale digital-native customer experience, telecom operators are moving away from digitizing existing interactions. They are focused on designing entirely new and innovative video interactions via moLotus mobile video customer interaction platform and tech; creating distinctive digital experiences robust enough to meet growing customer expectations.

Latest research reveals that by automating and transforming their processes digitally, telcos have eased the stress on their customers and created hassle-free experiences for them. Further, to adopt a zero-touch customer service model, operators are moving aggressively toward moLotus automation - fully AI-enabled, real time and custom integrated.

Processes including customer onboarding, document submission, customer sign-ups, customer support, service renewals, service upgrades, customer feedback and many more have been digitized, automated and transformed yielding better customer experience and engagement; while saving on cost, delighting the customers, and collecting performance data.

Conclusion

For the telecom industry transformation is nothing new. Operators have been reshaping themselves to drive down costs, introduce new digital channels, and deploy new technologies.

Along the way, the most effective telco leaders have demonstrated courage to envisage how things can be done differently and better going forward. In their pursuit for excellence, they have embraced breakthrough transformation technologies like moLotus bringing the next wave of change for operators; disrupting and reshaping the telco landscape.