English
The telecommunications industry is changing at a rapid pace, driven by amplified consumer demands, increased price competition as well the rise in new technologies, Communication Service Providers (CSP) are looking for new ways to capitalize on the free-flowing data streams. While consumers are unlikely to pay much of a premium, as inter-carrier competition is high, the commercial opportunities (through network transformation) are becoming more attractive as new revenue sources.
New Opportunities for Growth
It has been well documented in a recent Gartner report that 5G presents a significant opportunity for CSPs, leveraging the higher performance capabilities over 4G to enable new services across traditional and non-traditional market segments - generating new revenue streams and profits. However, consensus in the telco industry suggests that increasing consumer subscription charges will not justify the capital investment in 5G – as a result, CSPs are pivoting their revenue growth focus away from the consumer market and are progressing their 5G monetization strategy towards business users and specialized industries.
The technology enhancements of 5G will enable new use cases segmented into areas of Fixed Wireless Access, IoT and Critical ‘low-latency’ applications - further increasing the data traffic demands on the network. Building a platform to support these new use cases will require intelligent automation to efficiently track and manage the multitude of interactions happening behind the scenes. However, most of the support applications that operate billing, customer management, and support applications are generally outdated and incapable of rapid changes to support new business opportunities.
Intelligent Automation as a Bridge
With intelligent automation as a bridge between back-end processing systems and new service offerings, the business can leverage fast-moving market conditions and customer requests to build dashboards for data insights, solutions for specific industries, and management for new devices without overhauling the entire processing system. For example, imagine offering data for fleet management in logistics to support real-time tracking for individual loads providing not only location, temperature, speed, and ETA, but also live-video from within the load itself, tracked on a live dashboard allowing the customers to drill down into each load graphically. Additionally, that same dashboard could offer similar load analytics to track anomalies during shipment which lead to shortage or damage. Building this type of data view could be done quickly, leveraging intelligent automation to connect the systems, deliver the data, and provide customers with individualized, secure access. This transition permits CSP’s who are looking to offer services beyond connectivity to become deeply integrated within their customer’s value chain, leveraging their resources to differentiate from the competition and increase their value share across the 5G eco-system, in the B2B2X model.
Looking Forward
The concept of process automation is already well valued in the telecommunications marketplace, with many CSPs investing in business-led strategic programs to automate manual tasks across different functions. So, in the age of 5G, why specifically should these operators look further to enhance their automation capabilities? - For Communication Service Providers looking for more ideas about how they can expand their commercial service offerings quickly and cost-effectively, please download our white paper “Why RPA adoption is key to serving 5G-based market demands”.