Learned a lot lending an editorial hand here:
by Wilson Chow, Rolf Meakin, Mike Lawley, and Joseph Tagliaferro
In the past five years, telecom operators have recorded an average compound annual growth rate of -0.4% for their B2B activity. The industry’s cash cows are in decline. These include legacy wireline offerings, such as multiprotocol label switching, plain old telephone service and digital subscriber line services. The catch rates on newer internet-based products have not been high enough to pick up the slack. Moreover, the complexity of the industry’s legacy technology, business and operations support systems has stymied efforts to both reduce costs and bring innovations to market.
Buyers of B2B telecom services are also frustrated with what they perceive as a lack of responsiveness within the industry — a condition that has resulted in a high level of customer churn. Their dissatisfaction is exacerbated by a demographic changing of the guard: more and more buyers have service expectations set by a lifetime of dealing with digitally native consumer companies such as Amazon and Netflix. They expect service requests and delivery to be fulfilled on demand, and they don’t want to do business with telcos that can’t meet their expectations.
The new competitors, attracted by this combination of industry sluggishness and customer unrest, fall into two broad categories. The first includes companies such as Cisco, Juniper and Brocade; they seek to establish direct relationships with enterprise customers. They expect to do this by building a broad base of customers in the B2B market and selling services that overlap with telcos’ offerings, such as software-based VPNs and firewalls. The second group of competitors, which includes companies such as Amazon and Masergy, is seeking to disrupt the industry in a more fundamental way, less bound to established offerings. These companies are leveraging their agility and digital savvy to create new kinds of customer-centric solutions, test them with early adopters and bring them to market at an unprecedented pace — a pace that telcos struggle to match.
Telecom operators know they have advantages, particularly in their networks and long-established relationships with enterprise customers. They know that to better serve existing customers, win over new ones, reverse declining revenues and stymie competitors, they will need a major shift in their capabilities and outward-facing identity. This requires transformation. But knowing the effort and investment involved in transformations, and the high rates of failure, how can telecom leaders improve the odds for success? Read the rest here.
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