An OSS niche market opportunity?

The survey found that 82 percent of service providers conduct less than half of customer transactions digitally, despite the fact that nearly 80 percent of respondents said they are moving forward with business-wide digital transformation programs of varying size and scale. This underscores a large perception gap in understanding, completing and benefiting from digitalization programs.

The study revealed that more than one-third of service providers have completed some aspect of digital transformation, but challenges persist; nearly three-quarters of service providers identify legacy systems and processes, challenges relating to staff and skillsets and business risk as the greatest obstacles to transforming digital services delivery.

Driving a successful digital transformation requires companies to transform myriad business and operational domains, including customer journeys, digital product catalogs, partner management platforms and networks via software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV).
Survey from Netcracker and ICT Intuition.

Interesting study from Netcracker and ICT Intuition. To re-iterate with some key numbers and take-aways:

  1. 82% of responding service providers can increase digital transactions by at least 50% (in theory).  Digital transactions tend to be significantly cheaper for service providers than manual transactions. However, some customers will work the omni-channel experience to find the channel that they’re most comfortable dealing with. In many cases, this means attempting to avoid digital experiences. As a side note, any attempts to become 100% digital are likely to require social / behavioural engineering of customers and/or an associated churn rate
  2. Nearly 75% of responding service providers identify legacy systems / processes, skillsets and business risk as biggest challenges. This reads as putting a digital interface onto back-end systems like BSS / OSS tools. This is less of a challenge for newer operators that have been designed with digitalised customer interactions in mind. The other challenge for operators is that the digital front-ends are rarely designed to bolt onto the operators’ existing legacy back-end systems and need significant integration
  3. If an operator want to build a digital transaction regime, they should expect an OSS / BSS transformation too.

To overcome these challenges, I’ve noticed that some operators have been building up separate (often low-cost) brands with digital-native front ends, back ends, processes and skills bases. These brands tend to target the ever-expanding digitally native generations and be seen as the stepping stone to obsoleting legacy solutions (and perhaps even legacy business models?).

I wonder whether this is a market niche for smaller OSS players to target and grow into whilst the big OSS brands chase the bigger-brother operator brands?

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