“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.”
J.P. Morgan.
At their core, OSS and BSS are primarily about efficiency. They are tools to make the management of the following (and many more) easier and more efficient:
- Order entry
- Alarm / event management
- Service level tracking
- Network health tracking
- Field workforce management (truck-rolls)
- Trend identification
- Customer need identification
- etc, etc
And the available off-the-shelf B/OSS solutions do tend to be very sticky, often just due to the complexity of removing them.
But I wonder if the next generation of B/OSS are not just efficient but are also compelling.
As Rajat Paharia writes in his book, “Loyalty 3.0: How Big Data And Gamification Are Revolutionizing Customer And Employee Engagement“:
Loyalty 3.0 has three major enabling components that, when combined, are much greater than the sum of the parts:
- Motivation.Recent social-science research has much more clearly defined what compels and motivates human behavior, and what causes people to do things or not do things in life and in the workplace. Knowing what truly motivates people—and what doesn’t—enables us to create stronger engagement and true loyalty
- Big data. Technology has taken over how we communicate, socialize, work, and play. The amount of data that people are generating as they interact with these systems is exploding, and new technology is enabling businesses to capture that data with more granularity than ever before. Smart businesses can consume this data and use it to understand, engage, and motivate their constituents in ways not previously possible.
- Gamification. Game designers have been using data-driven motivational techniques for years. Our new understanding of motivation, combined with the emergence of big data streams, has enabled these techniques to be used outside the gaming world, where they can be powerful tools to drive engagement, participation, and high-value activity for customers, employees, and partners alike
I believe the next generation of OSS must have Loyalty 3.0 built into its core – to be compelling, efficient and less complex. It also has to build Loyalty for customer (CSP and enterprise) and end-user (the CSP’s customers). Easier said than done right?
Does your OSS have any one or even all three features of Loyalty 3.0 embedded in its DNA?