providers accelerate revenue, even as prices erode in the market overall. CSPs can create and offer new services quickly and make them instantly available to enterprise customers. They can also up-sell and cross-sell new services enhanced through network and value-added partnerships, giving customers more options with the advantage of streamlined service delivery through a marketplace providing everything an enterprise customer needs for their existing and new services.

Service providers can also accelerate time to revenue by leveraging greater, end-to-end automation. It’s a win-win for CSPs, as it can minimize bottlenecks for both customer and service providers, speeding service delivery and accelerating revenue.

Successfully making the shift to a customer-centric culture hinges upon three things: making customer control and CX central to the organization; using a platform that will make it systematic and enable automation where possible; and becoming a more efficient, optimized company. The end result is happier customers, reduced churn, and the ability to launch new products and offerings quickly as you see opportunities in the market.

It's why CloudSmartz has built Acumen360™, its digital customer experience and marketplace platform solution. Ultimately, Acumen360 enables CSPs to transform into digital-first service providers to deliver a unified service experience. With Acumen360, service providers can become a platform for enterprise customers, providing an ecosystem of technologies and bundled services.

One example is how data center providers are benefiting from CloudSmartz’s marketplace approach to enable buying and selling of services through the marketplace via APIs (REST APIs and supporting integration standards such as MEF LSO APIs). Services can be bundled, enabling connection points and different levels of service for one or multiple locations. Ultimately, a service provider can offer end-to-end service and last-mile connectivity to any location from the data center in a full package via the marketplace. Instead of buying one thing configuring, waiting, and then another, it’s as simple as buy it, connect it, and execute it. This provides far greater value with reduced complexity, and a far better customer experience.

Granular visibility into network management and performance can also help service providers pinpoint opportunities for improvement that can be transformed into upsells. One such example is proactive notifications that provide real-time value. Let’s say that a service provider identifies a trend, that the network hits an 80 percent threshold every Sunday and Wednesday at 3:00 pm. The provider may want to boost bandwidth by scheduling an upgrade—and smaller players can realize additional revenue by having the flexibility to scale up and down with business intelligence provided by that analytics piece. This is just one small example but multiply it by dozens or even hundreds of these kinds of opportunities, across thousands of customers, and you begin to see the potential for reducing OPEX, improving CX, and accelerating new revenue opportunities.

Simplifying operations

The ability to elevate CX, digitize operations, and enable new offerings that drive revenue is tantalizing, but the reality of enabling zero touch across the spiderweb of existing CSP systems can pose a challenge. A solution must encompass OSS and BSS, provisioning, network management systems, billing, and more. These are systems that have evolved over years, if not decades, and they may not interface with each other properly.

This complexity makes the shift from network-centric to customer-centric seem daunting. It’s where Acumen360™ offers powerful simplification. The Acumen360 platform creates a portal with modules—like SDN and CPQ—that becomes the customer experience. Then it uses API management tools to connect into the different systems on the provider side, get the appropriate data to update the systems, and manage the experience for the business as well as the end customer. This is not a fundamental change to the underlying systems as they are designed to function, but instead it’s about bringing greater interoperability as an overlay of systems that integrate in a meaningful way through tools and processes to provide a desired CX outcome. The overlay approach simplifies and optimizes the CSPs’ business, and really allows the customer the flexibility they need—but it doesn’t enable the customer to change everything.

Giving customers control, digitizing operations, and increasing speed and flexibility for service delivery are all hard, independently. Together they present a next-level challenge. But with competition creeping in, now is the time to make the shift toward a customer-driven network and operations. CSPs ready to take the next step should look for a solution that can provide a foundational platform for network technologies and value-added partners. With it, CSPs can provide a unified service experience—and become a trusted link between enterprise customers and everything they need for business-critical operations.

If you’d like to learn more, you can automatically book a meeting with CloudSmartz through Pipeline’s business introduction service, or visit the CloudSmartz website to learn more about Acumen360 and how it helps service providers give customers more control, simplify service delivery, and accelerate revenue.