Today’s transport customer has moved beyond the standard customer portal that includes billing and trouble ticket information. Today’s customers are now mandating real-time insight into the services they are buying. It is even becoming common place for state governments, health-care providers, financial services, and wholesale buyers of transport services to mandate service portals in their RFPs.
All telecom executives want to improve their company’s connection with their customers. They state that it is imperative to deliver a new, improved and digitized customer journey; however, there are typically two key areas of concern. First, telecom operators are regularly told they need to rip and replace their legacy infrastructure. Second, they are apprehensive what the real-time view will present. The good news (for carriers): both concerns are addressed by leveraging a true “agile app layer.”
Agile software leverages assets and deleverages risk
No longer are carriers required to do daunting and risky wholesale upgrades. These upgrades are characterized by an expensive, slow, and painful process for both the service provider and their customers. Agile software means having the ability to enhance legacy infrastructure while reducing the risk, time, and costs associated with deploying new business-critical applications. Adding an agile layer to current legacy infrastructure permits a service provider to de-couple the customer experience (application) from the underlying technology and support systems. Now the carrier can define the customer interactions such as service visualization independent of legacy architectures and their limitations.
Agility will become an important competitive tool for helping forward-looking service providers remain relevant in today’s digital environment. An agile layer ensures telecom operators realize the business benefits of a customer-first approach in a matter of days, by eliminating the legacy “rip and replace” methods and associated risk. Now service providers can focus more on providing a stellar experience for the customer and less on the technology behind it.
Requirements for an agile layer
To achieve these goals, agile platforms must offer extensive platform flexibility as well as out-of-the-box configurations to ensure comprehensive operational adaptation for operators. This inherent functionality means a solution can be up and running in a matter of days, supporting tailored outcomes and customized offerings. Now telecom operators can shave off months of building time for items like data collection, integration, models, logic, and user interfaces, which are all vital pieces of providing a modern digitized interface to customers without forcing wholesale modernizing of current legacy technologies and systems.
Agile architecture gives operators flexibility in future upgrades, enabling operators to specialize the platform for specific regions, products, and customers, as needed. An agile layer can help to ease the reliability, maintenance, and future scaling of systems, too, giving operators the freedom and flexibility to replace legacy infrastructure at their own pace.
An agile customer engagement platform expedites service providers’ path to a forward-thinking, customer-first interaction philosophy, minimizing time spent building and integrating new customer-facing platforms with the behind-the-scenes legacy systems.
OcularIP leverages agility in Self-service Customer Portal
SaaS provider, OcularIP, leverages the web-scale approach to modernizing business stacks by offering service providers the ability to modernize the customer experience and service assurance without relying on an all-or-nothing “rip and replace” approach.
OcularIP is based on the foundation of augment and update: the platform augments current assets with an agile and intelligent software layer – utilizing the intrinsic, underutilized data in legacy technologies and systems. This agile layer is able to deliver new features through leveraging its automation, data visualization, and AI style approaches – to provide best-in-class service analytics and customer experiences.
For service providers, upgrading their infrastructure, technologies, and BSS/OSS systems is a messy endeavor and incredibly complicated. The OcularIP service assurance and visualization platform is custom built specifically for telecom operators. It embraces functions such as out-of-the-box connectors that easily link with telecom operators’ legacy technologies and systems, including inventory, trouble ticketing, and billing and fulfillment – smoothing the integration pathways between technology stacks.
OcularIP can also help align goals and strategies between IT and business divisions. The platform’s design ensures that both a businessperson and an IT person can understand and use it, removing many of the pain points by ensuring that each party is speaking the same language.
The customer journey, transformed
Service providers can exceed customer expectations and realize operational cost savings by establishing intelligent, customer-centric workflows that transform the customer journey. But what does it look like in action?
Operators can improve the customer journey by delivering a personalized and frictionless experience to the customer. For example, when a customer is having issues with a service, OcularIP’s agile, web-scale, intelligent “brain” delivers all the pertinent service information to the user. The system is then able to immediately begin working to resolve the issue, without need for backtracking with the customer or manually retrieving relevant information across systems.
Using OcularIP, service providers are able to leverage agility to yield better results across the business: customers are happy with the new set of experiences that puts them first; and the operator is able to reduce redundancies, eliminate inefficiencies, and realize cost savings by streamlining operations between legacy systems and next-generation customer experiences.
140+ carriers are currently using OcularIP to report TRUE performance and save real money: $356 per circuit per year on average!
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