Building a Winning Digital Telco: Software’s Role in Flexible Offers and Seamless Customer Experiences

Do you feel like you need to constantly balance on a tightrope to keep your telco afloat? 

You have to balance:

One of the ways that telcos can maintain this balance is by building digital telco brands or Digital Mobile Operators (DMOs). DMOs break free from the limitations of traditional telcos by harnessing modern digital platforms, cloud-based technologies, and advanced data analytics. This innovative approach enables them to deliver agile, customer-centric and efficient services.

But is it still necessary to offer great customer experiences? What role does your software play in your DMO’s customer experience?

2024 Research Reaffirms the Need for Great Customer Experiences

Historically, great customer experiences have been a key driver of improvements in revenue, uplifts in loyalty, and cost savings.

In August 2023, we researched Digital Natives in different countries to learn more about their mobile plan usage and perceptions of the telco industry. 

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We found that they look for three main points when it comes to outstanding customer experiences:

Optimizing The Telco Customer Journey

The telco customer journey can be broken down into a series of broad steps shown below:

Software significantly influences the quality of the experience delivered at every step. For this article, we’ll focus on how software supports these three steps:

Selecting a Plan: Supporting and Launching Flexible Mobile Plans

With consumer demands changing, launching new products quickly has become table stakes.

Legacy software tends to have long and complex upgrade processes and can take a long time to launch new products or campaigns. Legacy telco software often consists of multiple layers of custom integrations accumulated over decades, with new additions made to address evolving market demands.

Pre-integrated full-stack software cuts through these inefficiencies and allows you to launch new products at a fraction of the time. Robin Langdon, Vice President of Circles’ Product Team, says:

Legacy telcos also often manage extensive product catalogs containing thousands of items accumulated over decades. Without a flexible, customizable product template, each variation of mobile plans and add-ons must be treated as a separate product. 

This approach complicates product launches, slows time-to-market, and leads to bloated catalogs that are difficult to manage. To become true digital operators, telcos must simplify and streamline their offerings to just two or three core products.

Pre-integrated telco SaaS solutions address this challenge with integrated BSS, product cataloging, and order management capabilities designed to support mobile plans with flexible add-ons. 

By utilizing scalable, templated product definitions, telcos can rapidly create and launch new offers without the burden of an unwieldy catalog, enabling greater agility and efficiency.

One example is the “0” JPY base plan from KDDI’s digital telco brand povo. This approach lets subscribers tailor their plans by opting for their preferred “toppings,” like the DAZN entertainment service that features on-demand sports entertainment. 

Onboarding: SaaS Telco Software Role in Seamless Onboarding

A SaaS approach ensures continuous optimization of your software and customer experiences, including more streamlined onboarding processes.

SaaS providers actively gather client feedback and consistently work to enhance both their software's performance and the customer experience. Telco SaaS providers operating their own telcos with their software, in particular, place heavy emphasis on optimizing customer onboarding journeys. Robin says:

The full-stack SaaS approach also leverages modern SaaS functions to optimize functions like order processing. For example, Circles’ streamlined system connects directly to the provisioning gateway for immediate network activation, unlike older systems that take minutes to do the same.

App Experience: Full-stack SaaS Can Keep App Experiences Fresh and Fast

To keep their clients competitive, telco SaaS teams constantly create new capabilities for their customers.

Good telco SaaS providers focus on removing the complexity from software upgrades. They will collect capability requests from their clients and users and assess which requests are scalable. 

If a new capability is deemed scalable, it will be developed and made available to all their clients. Client telcos can then quickly put these new capabilities into production. 

This approach to updates ensures that your software and experiences you provide to your customers are consistently useful and in-demand. 

Conclusion: Make the Digital Shift with Confidence

For telcos aiming to succeed in today’s competitive market, building a Digital Mobile Operator focusing on consistent and flexible mobile plans and a smooth onboarding journey is not just an option—it’s a necessity. 

From delivering frictionless digital experiences to leveraging advanced technology, the path forward is clear: investing in the right software to power your onboarding process to create lasting customer loyalty and maximize growth.

Ready to Take Action?

Ready to accelerate your journey to becoming a leading Digital Mobile Operator? 

Circles’ telco software and real-life experience running DMO brands can help you create award-winning telco user experiences. Don’t miss out, and contact us today to learn more!