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Meeting customer demands
The second challenge for wireless operators in emerging markets is attracting
and retaining subscribers against fierce competition.
A common Western misconception is that subscribers in emerging markets are not
demanding. In reality, customers in emerging markets have extremely high
expectations and are very technologically literate. Indeed, competition is a
major reason why India has some of the lowest mobile rate plans in the world.
This competition for subscribers may drive to extinction operators that do not
address customer experience, innovate and improve their product portfolio and
service level agreements (SLAs).
It is this need to defend market share
and capture new subscribers that
drives innovation in service offerings.
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Western telcos may find that they are dogs facing off against wolves. |
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customers in emerging markets,
telecoms providers simply cannot wait.
Unified operational systems can
implement customer-centric
management without major integration
projects.
With unified OSS, some operators in Asia are now achieving ratios of staff to
subscribers that are almost half that of counterparts in Western Europe and
North America; one major Indian operator is achieving a ratio of 1:1750.
Learnings for the West
With 2010-11 set to be a challenging year in terms of revenue, parallels between
OSS practices in emerging and developed countries are more pertinent than ever.
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Operators in emerging markets need
systems that help them “go-live” with
services quickly and easily manage the
transition from low- to high-revenue
services. Demands for 12-15 new
products and features per year for
mobile service providers in emerging
markets are not unheard of and are
being supported by unified operational
systems today.
Just as in developed markets, the OSS must intelligently map network status,
planned outages and provisioning key performance indicators (KPIs) to customer
facing SLAs, and coordinate and prioritise responses when SLAs are in jeopardy
or breech. Whilst automation and efficient manual processes remain the
fundamental means of maintaining excellent customer experience, SLA management
can gauge and improve that experience, focusing management on the subscriber’s
needs.
In “Best of Breed” solutions,
maintaining customer-centric
perspectives is often the culmination of
years of evolution. To meet demands of
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Certainly, the approaches operators in emerging markets have taken to overcome
the challenges they face have been hard learned; Western operators ignore them
at their peril.
The traditional “Best of Breed” approach to OSS, common in the developed world,
is often unsuited to emerging markets. In contrast, unified operations – an
open, NGOSS-based, modular, pre-integrated, end-to-end OSS solution – presents
operators in emerging markets with sophisticated automation without the
associated long lead times and high costs.
As Western telcos attempt to step into these markets, they should be aware that
they will be competing with local providers who have grown up in an environment
of low ARPUs and high churn, and who have developed the “lean” models needed to
cope with it. Western telcos should not be lulled into the sense that competing
with these operators will be easy; indeed, they may find that they are dogs
facing off against wolves.
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