Building a Winning DMO: Two Digital Transformation Approaches For Customer-Driven Agility

Digital transformation in the telecommunications sector is often fraught with challenges. With an estimated 70% of transformations failing, telcos face significant risks of wasted resources, budget overruns, and missed opportunities.¹

These failures often stem from fragmented strategies, legacy system constraints, and a lack of customer-centric approaches. However, a clear path forward exists: adopting a clean slate, full-stack transformation model. 

This approach blends the fresh-start benefits of a greenfield digital transformation with the strategic focus of an outside-in perspective. By replacing legacy systems, telcos can eliminate common constraints like overly complex integrations, inefficient processes, and slow response times.

An outside-in strategy puts the customer first, starting with the target segment and the experiences you aim to deliver. From there, your software must be purpose-built to support these experiences, ensuring it aligns with your customer-centric vision.

By partnering with the right telco software provider, a clean slate, full-stack approach can address many common pitfalls of digital transformation—such as fragmented systems, misaligned goals, and operational inefficiencies. In this post, we’ll explore two clean-slate full-stack methods to modernize your telco and enhance its agility, efficiency, and customer experience:

Phased Migration of the Main Brand: A Path to Seamless Modernization

For telcos aiming to modernize their core brand, phased migration to new software offers a strategic and customer-centric solution. 

Running The New Software Parallel to Your Existing System Prevents Service Disruptions

Data migration risks are a significant concern for any telco software overhaul. When migrating subscribers, issues with the software or the data migration itself can delay the migration and even affect service during peak hours.

The clean slate full-stack approach solves this by hosting the new software separately from your existing servers and migrating customer batches during off-peak hours.

Shifting to Your Main Brand Full-stack Software Makes Digital Transformation Fast and Efficient

Full-stack software can provide out-of-the-box functionality that a digital-native telco brand requires supplied from one vendor. This reduces the time and manpower needed to set up the software and launch your MVP. With fewer integrations and vendors to deal with, you’ll be able to give your customers the best customer experiences within months instead of years. 

Upgrading To a Full-stack Changes Both Your Organization’s Processes and Software Together, Avoiding Common Digital Transformation Pitfalls

This end-to-end transformation approach aims to change your core telco brand’s institutional logic: the closely intertwined relationship between your software and people's processes to manage it. 

Trying to transform only your IT systems or processes without changing the other will result in pushback, which is why most transformations fail. The phased migration approach lets you change your core brand’s software while building new processes.

Here are the steps:

Experienced external partners can help you mitigate data migration risks and also provide you with their telco SaaS solutions to speed up your core brand’s telco migration to a full-stack solution. Here are a few steps to help you find the right partner:

Step 1: Identify your telco’s needs

Before diving into looking for partners, take the time to evaluate your organization’s specific priorities and resources. Key considerations include:

Step 2: Identify experienced SaaS partners

After determining the expertise and resources you need, seek out SaaS providers with proven track records of successful migrations. You can look out for:

Step 3: Evaluate each partner’s strengths and weaknesses

Not all SaaS partners are created equal. Assess potential partners based on their:

Step 4: Evaluate each partner’s approaches and compare with internal needs

Ensure the partner’s proposed strategies align with your telco’s requirements:

Every telco faces its own unique challenges, and the partner and solution you arrive at will be similarly unique. If your telco has sufficient capability to develop its own in-house software, working with external consultants can still help with planning and overcoming blindspots. Alternatively, you can work with a partner who can provide help with your telco’s full-stack digital transformation from beginning to end. 

This ensures that you get the right software and support that give your customers memorable customer experiences as quickly as possible.

Scaling a Parallel Digital Brand: The Digital Attacker Advantage

Launching a parallel digital brand, often called a "digital attacker," provides telcos with an opportunity to innovate rapidly without disrupting their core operations. 

These brands target niche markets or specific customer segments, offering distinct value propositions and streamlined digital experiences. The success of digital attacker telco brands lies in multiple areas:²

Provide Improved Customer Experiences Rapidly.

Telcos often struggle with overly complex product portfolios, which negatively impact the customer experience, especially compared to the simplicity of digital-native alternatives.

Launching a digital attacker brand on a separate platform can streamline product catalogs and deliver seamless, predictive, and responsive customer experiences. By partnering with the right provider, you can launch a new brand in as little as six months, achieving NPS scores that are 30–40 points higher than those of competitors.

Cannibalism? Adjust Your Digital Attacker To Your Brand Strategy

Subscriber cannibalization is a common concern, but its impact largely depends on your branding strategy. If your digital transformation involves sunsetting the old brand bogged down by legacy software, cannibalization may be part of the plan. Alternatively, you can avoid cannibalization with clear audience segmentation and distinct branding tailored to your target market.

Digital Attackers Can Bring in New Subscribers

Digital attacker brands have demonstrated the ability to contribute up to 25% of new subscribers within a year while maintaining profitability over five percentage points higher than the parent brand.

These brands attract 70% of customers who are entirely new to the operator, with acquisition costs roughly half that of the legacy brand. Once scaled, they can reduce the cost to serve by 50–70% and consistently deliver superior customer experiences, achieving NPS scores 30–40 points higher than incumbent competitors.

As the digital attacker gains traction, its best practices can influence the core brand, driving broader transformation across the telco.

Here are the steps to scaling up a parallel brand:

Creating a parallel digital brand begins with understanding market needs and designing a unique identity, product offerings, and customer experience tailored to those needs. 

Once launched, these brands operate independently, utilizing agile feedback loops to refine their services and expand their market share.

When working with external partners, using one with an outside-in-designed full-stack solution provides multiple benefits, which we discuss below.

The Strategic Role of SaaS-Driven Full-Stack Solutions

Both phased migration and digital attacker strategies depend on your choice of software. Working with pre-integrated full-stack telco software can help you launch your new platforms within 6 months.

Full-stack telco operating systems integrate all essential telco functions, from Business Support Systems (BSS) and Operations Support Systems (OSS) to Martech capabilities, into a cohesive system. This integration simplifies operations, reduces costs, and enables faster time-to-market for new products and services. 

Working with a telco software provider who focuses on customer-driven, outside-in perspectives can get you software that provides a seamless, data-driven, and personalized customer experience. With all functions pre-integrated, all customer data will be collected in an integrated data lake for analysis, with nothing left stranded in silos.

Working with SaaS solutions also prevents your telco from facing software obsolescence. Your software will receive periodic updates based on feedback from multiple telcos worldwide, helping you stay competitive in today’s rapidly changing market.

Conclusion: A Blueprint for Success

The telecommunications industry is at a crossroads, and the stakes for digital transformation have never been higher. 

By adopting a clean slate, full-stack approach, telcos can achieve customer-driven agility, operational efficiency, and market leadership. Whether through phased migration or launching a parallel digital brand, these strategies enable telcos to overcome legacy system challenges and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

At Circles, we specialize in guiding telcos through these transformations. Our expertise in SaaS-driven solutions and real-world experience with digital brands worldwide equip us to help your telco navigate this journey. 

By focusing on customer needs and leveraging proven playbooks, we can help your organization transition seamlessly into a techco that thrives in the digital age.

Don’t wait to redefine your telco’s future. Contact us today to learn how we can empower your digital transformation.