Our prescription for big transformation fatigue

In my last blog, I wrote about Two-Speed IT and how I think it applies to telcos. I believe we have now reached the tipping point where opting for a faster speed of IT is not just viable, it’s preferable for telcos that are addressing a dynamic new customer segment for whom life moves very quickly (video).

As Manuel Pangilinan, Group Chairman of our customer PLDT Group, said recently, “If you don’t accelerate the pace of Digital, someone else will do it for you.” Essentially, if you have a time-to-market advantage over your competitors, you can win customers, generate loyalty and get them to recommend your services to their friends.

At MATRIXX, pace has always been important: when we talk about real-time customer interaction, we mean opportunities to engage and deliver to their needs in the twinkle of a consumer’s eye. But it also means having the agility to deliver new data services that are self-directed and controlled direct from their device. In effect, consumers are driving the transformation of how telcos need to work in order to remain relevant.

For some telcos, that means steady, measured progress through substantial IT transformation projects. For others, it means gauging how to pull off a successful Moon Shot. The customers we talk to recognize that there’s a window of opportunity to enter the developing Digital services market, and that they need the agility to address it with speed.

That’s why we recently launched a disruptive cloud solution in partnership with SalesForce that delivers service providers a strategic new cloud-based stack and a clear path to establish their second mode of IT. This is not traditional BSS moved into the cloud. Rather, it’s a more effective, redesigned approach – an agile IT stack built on entirely new technology that can enable older companies to quickly build new digital capabilities for product development, omni-channel customer experiences, and business process automation. Ultimately it was designed to accelerate the buildout of new revenue streams that evolve in relation to your customer’s daily desires.

We consciously threw away old approaches to what a telco stack ‘needs to look like,’ and instead focused on the pieces that enable the telco to automate, move fast, improve the customer experience, and be more creative with offerings; we took the best of the best, and dispensed with the rest.

What we’ve created is a stack that offers the essential strategic functions for success in the Digital market:

• Omni-channel customer lifecycle engagement
• Real-time customer experience and self-care
• Configurable product catalogs that enable product design based on customer experience versus network requirements
• Guided selling
• Real-time revenue management

And, we matched the functionality to a streamlined, strategic architecture:

• Accessible through hybrid cloud
• Foundation in a common data model
• Best-of-breed SalesForce CRM infrastructure
• Cost effective scalability for billions of events a day
• Extensibility, with new capabilities offered automatically from the cloud when new releases go live, with no need for disruptive, expensive upgrades.

This is why big telco groups such as PLDT – and their SMART Communications brand – are turning to MATRIXX to drive their Digital strategies; we’re a proven alternative to the status quo. With MATRIXX, “going Digital” is a simple, painless, rapid experience for telcos that want to become DSPs and start developing their own market segments and revenue streams rather than have their competitors define it for them.

In my next blog post, I’ll share some of the benefits that our customers – Swisscom, Vodafone, Telstra and SMART Communications – have already seen from taking this type of Digital approach, and what their customers think about it too!