2 years ago

Top 7 Critical Pain Points for Telecom in 2023

(Updated November 2022)

To stand out from the competition, telecommunication companies must first recognize and overcome a few specific problems.

Here are 7 major telecom pain points in 2023 and the technologies that can help fix them.

Table of contents: 

# Challenge 1: Data Segmentation and Redundancy 

# Challenge 2: Low Customer Outreach and Conversion 

# Challenge 3: Lack of Agile System Integration 

# Challenge 4: Poor Efficiency and High Operational Costs 

# Challenge 5: Technological Expertise and R&D 

# Challenge 6: Edge Computing Brings New Architectural Challenges 

# Challenge 7: Digital Twins Are Reshaping the Foundations 

# The Way Forward 

 

Emerging technologies are creating a major transformation in telecommunication services. In 2021, 5.3 billion people subscribed to mobile services, representing 67% of the global population. By 2025, it is estimated that the number of mobile subscribers worldwide will reach 5.7 billion (70% of the world’s population). 

Subscribers seek fast mobile data connection and high bandwidth to interact on various digital media platforms and utilize numerous IoT devices. The mobile infrastructure is becoming more sophisticated, and telecommunication providers need to redesign their business models to monetize these advanced networks.

Source: GSMA Intelligence 

Challenge 1: Data Segmentation and Redundancy 

With huge data volume flows and complicated business processes, telecommunication companies need a solid data strategy and an effective way to continuously integrate new products and functionalities. 

Moreover, they need a system that allows for effective data segmentation and avoidance of data redundancy so they can quickly identify and seize market opportunities. Our engineers created a customized system using multiple metadata and configuration parameters for a major European Telecom company. It enabled greater flexibility and easier maintenance. 

Effective data warehouse management and proper data storage must be implemented across the telecom industry to solve data redundancy issues. EDWs act as a data repository and allow businesses to leverage near-real-time data processing approaches. For a major Telecom provider, Scalefocus continues to integrate new systems in their EDWH, including Highway, an eCommerce platform, IFRS, GDPR, performance optimizations, refactoring, and portfolio integrations in the core data models. 

Data lakes provide a scalable way to keep market data moving across systems. Scalefocus has experience in implementing data lakes using Microsoft Azure. We successfully built a cloud-based solution for another client, lowering management costs, decreasing report generation, and eliminating manual data collection and analysis processes. 

Challenge 2: Low Customer Outreach and Conversion 

Legacy eCommerce platforms have inadequate features which reduce the likelihood of customer conversion and don’t prioritize customer needs. 

Luckily, there are several eCommerce solutions that create a powerful omnichannel experience. They personalize the customer’s journey toward subscribing to a Telecom service. Telecom companies can use CRM software to better identify customers’ pain points and provide better customer service. They decrease customer churn through robust analytics and engage customers through chatbots and social media plugins. 

Scalefocus has implemented its full-featured eCommerce platform for a major European Telecom operator. The platform is customized to their needs while providing high availability, performance, and scalability.  

For another Telecom operator, Scalefocus was chosen to maintain, support and further develop their B2B/ B2C web-based Self Care portals and mobile customer apps. Our engineers migrated the company’s Web Farm legacy systems to a new modern server. We also performed rebranding, refactoring, code optimization, and restructuring. 

Our iOS and Android teams also created a mobile app for a Telecom company that allows users to manage and configure their accounts and mobile plans. Users can see an overview of their data consumption, SMS, or minutes, subscribe or unsubscribe to any features, promotions, and services.  

After launching the app, our client has decreased the manual labor of customer support and store staff. Revenue steadily increased as users can now easily subscribe to new promotions. The company has gained valuable insights that it can use to finetune and tailor its services to specific customer interests. 

Challenge 3: Lack of Agile System Integration 

Many telco companies still use complicated coding and point-to-point integration. This becomes inefficient and challenging when adding external vendors, suppliers, and warehouses. 

Scalefocus builds custom integration solutions that sync existing message queues, API endpoints and read data directly from its source. Scalefocus creates an IT integration layer to help you meet your obligations to vendors, suppliers, and sales teams. This integration layer collects all the data and provides a single dashboard for better planning. 

For a major Bulgarian Telecom operator, Scalefocus managed to successfully integrate its various systems: Amdocs OMS, CRM, billing, resource management, Prima, key accounts system, mail client, SMS center, user management system, a fraud system, and DWH. 

“Number Portability One-Stop-Shop EAI is a fully automated solution for all types of numbers – mobile, fixed, and non-geographic. It is compliant with the regulatory procedure announced by the Communication Regulation Commission.  

“Scalefocus was a tremendous contributor to the success of the Mobile Number Portability project. They truly showed a great commitment to providing outstanding IT consultancy and meeting our business objectives.” 

Lyubomira Mihailova – Project Manager, Mobiltel 

For another client, we centralized their electronic order management processes and significantly reduced the costs of communication with their strategic partner. We implemented new software and services with multitenant functionalities. They enabled smooth transition and quick adaptation of the client to the dynamic market and customer behavior trends. 

Challenge 4: Poor Efficiency and High Operational Costs 

Analog back-office procedures and antiqued technologies are eating away from the efficiency of the communication service providers (CSP). The faster front-office processes become digitized, the more pressure back-office operations face to keep up with the changes.    

Analog transactions are a common pain point. They are taking too long, costing too much, and causing errors, resulting in poor quality services and unhappy customers. 

At Scalefocus, we build RPA solutions based on UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism. These technologies enable Telecoms to drastically decrease operational expenses, human errors, and manual labor through automation. 

One success story from a US-based Telecom provider illustrates the positive effects of automation. We automated the processes related to requesting, approving, and updating employee positions, compensations and bonuses. Partnering with Scalefocus, the company now enjoys a 50% reduction in request processing time. 

Challenge 5: Technological Expertise and R&D 

It’s normal for companies to experience some doubt and confusion when implementing new technology, product, or service. However, they must be proactive in learning how to assess and apply its beneficial features to their business. 

IoT has opened the door for Telecoms to enrich their portfolio with a wide range of value-added services. Telecoms already have the technical expertise in IoT but need to invest in R&D to create new, innovative solutions. 

Scalefocus offers professional consultation, which can help you navigate the murky waters of market penetration and business expansion using unfamiliar technologies. We also design and develop custom telecom solutions that will place your business ahead in a highly competitive environment. These solutions include smart home enablement (security, entertainment, remote work), 4/8K streaming, live events, and enablement of a variety of real-time services via 5G’s ultra-low latency. 

Challenge 6: Edge Computing Brings New Architectural Challenges 

Edge computing, which stores and processes data closer to the end user, is swiftly becoming an investment priority for telecommunication companies. 

Telco companies will use edge cloud with 5G to reduce latency and bandwidth usage. These are essential for supporting complex IoT networks, augmented/virtual reality (AR/VR) like the metaverse, new services, and applications. 

As social media, video streaming, and online gaming erupt with the rolling out of 5G mobile networks, pushing caching out to the far edges has become mandatory. 

Content providers have been encouraged to migrate from a regional PoP CDN model to edge-based transparent and intelligent caching architectures. 

CDNs (Content delivery networks) are not a new concept. However, creating CDN nodes with regional points of presence (PoP) is one example of how near-edge computing can be utilized. 

Following the Pareto Principle, 80% of customers will consume 20% of all the content when it comes to video streaming. Therefore, by caching 20% of their content in their edge data centers, CSPs will serve 80% of their customer base, greatly reducing the load on the backbone networks and dramatically improving the user experience. 

Telecommunication companies must restructure their architecture to take advantage of edge computing, enabling intelligent automation and a software-focused operational environment. Operators will need to use modular components that can be modified independently without causing disruptions. They must divorce the infrastructure from the operations support system (OSS) and adopt standardized interfaces. 

Challenge 7: Digital Twins Are Reshaping the Foundations 

Digital twins offer many opportunities to telecommunication companies, but solid data availability with flexible data-driven network architecture is essential. 

A digital twin is a digital version of a physical object, process, or service. It leverages data from the actual world to generate simulations and forecast how a product or process will behave. 

Communications service providers are already leveraging 5G networks to offer new services. With the help of digital twins, they will be able to address pain points and complex 5G consumer and industry use cases. 

Digital twins can help telco companies to monitor their networks, predict anomalies, automate self-healing and perform advanced simulations. 

To utilize effectively the digital twins technology telco providers need to scale their platforms. They must automate their network and service management and incorporate effective algorithms for predictive demand and maintenance.  

The challenge is to incorporate standard data models, classify the data and unify its structure for the digital technology to perform. And digital integration is the first step to making this possible.    

The Way Forward 

Telcos find themselves surging toward an ever-increasing world of connectivity and still have considerable work to do.  

Scalefocus assists telecommunications companies in solving telecom integration challenges and addressing productivity pain points such as increased usage data. We effectively orchestrate that data with interconnected systems so Telcos can reach meaningful insights and unlock new revenue streams. 

Discover how successful global companies have benefited from working with Scalefocus.

Contact us to chat with our team or get a free consultation.