MWC 2024 has come and gone, and their 6 main themes were:

To us at Circles, we feel that these 6 themes can be boiled down to two main points that are driving the telco industry:

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Going Beyond Connectivity

Our industry has been facing higher costs and decreasing revenue when it comes to connectivity. This quote from TM Forum, a fellow MWC 2024 attendee, captures it best:

“Advances in technology have contributed to the recent accelerated global pace of change impacting all avenues of life, now considered by many to be the fourth industrial revolution: the digital revolution. The telecom industry has not been immune to this change and telco B2C average growth rates fell to just 1.57 percent in 2022^[1] (compared to 5.6 percent win the B2B market) with compounded compression likely to have occurred in 2023.

Diminishing revenues, a growing consumer demand for digital services, and shifting customer expectations and growing investment requirements have meant that traditional telcos can no longer afford to be merely connectivity providers and the dawn of a new era for telcos has been forced to emerge.”

Different telco players have responded in their own ways. Some are focusing on B2B2X partnership ecosystem plays while others are focusing on non-telco B2C services as TM Forum had pointed out. Partnership models fell into 4 categories:

These partnership models at MWC 2024 are covered more in our post on partnership models at MWC.

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Digital Transformation: Telcos to Techcos

If ‘telcos to techcos’ wasn’t used an exhibitor’s tagline at MWC 2024, then it was part of their presentation instead.

In addition to ways to enable new non-telco revenue streams via partnerships, new use cases for AI and Generative AI were on full display. AI use cases ranged from safer use-cases like operational excellence and optimisation to lower costs, to more ambitious projects like a full-service telco service powered completely by AI.

With our focus on customer experience, we zoomed in on AI’s applications for customer experience, such as conversational chatbots and agent co-pilots. We’ve summarised our perspectives in our post on AI’s role in telco customer experience.

Great Customer Experiences are Still At the Heart of Techcos

The role of a telco has been steadily evolving from exclusively a connectivity provider to a techco that provides various digital lifestyle offerings to an enabler for various B2B2C and B2B2B ventures.

While we focus on tackling our industry’s collective transformation into techcos and going beyond connectivity, we need to remember to that great customer experience is at the heart of what we do. 

As a company that is both a telco software provider and runs a digital telco brand, Circles.Life, building great customer experiences is part of our Circles.Co DNA. 

Also, we don’t just believe in building anything for just ourselves but sharing what works with our telco partners. Our latest plan to help telcos transform into ideal techcos is based on three pillars:

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Connectivity

Connectivity is the first basic block, and we master providing connectivity before building beyond it.  

Being the foundation of the whole telco experience, we believe in enabling connectivity services in an always-on, well-executed and frictionless way.

To do this, we focus on helping you connect easily and connect efficiently:

Delight

Not everyone in the market has the same needs, and serving the demand of first-movers builds the foundation for serving those who are trailing behind. 

For this pillar, our plan is to acquire and retain digitally-savvy customers and first-movers in target markets at lower costs per acquisition and to overall increase customer lifetime value (CLV). 

To delight digitally-savvy customers, our approach focuses on obsessing over their data and customer journeys. We’ve been building our software using our own insights and experiences as telco operators ourselves. This way, we can help you optimise great customer experiences and deliver them the best lifestyle partnerships offers. 

Beyond

With strong tech brands like Amazon (via Prime, Twitch and their Shopping) and powerhouses like WeChat in China, the telco industry has no shortage of what digital lifestyle hubs could look like.

We chose Beyond as our third pillar to raise the barrier of switching and deepen the digital moat for consumers’ engagement beyond only connectivity - and enable techcos to be everyone’s digital lifestyle hub.

To do this, we’re emphasising rapid experimentation that lets partners rapidly onboard lifestyle partner offerings and test them on their digital app. This lifestyle app ecosystem is powered by Open APIs for the ease of onboarding.

One of the hallmarks of our tech-driven era is open-source collaboration. Everything we have is built on what others have shared before us, like what Stack Overflow, GitHub and Wikipedia do.

At Circles, we personally test what we’ve built for ourselves before we share it with others. That way we do our best to reach our goal of being “digital operators, by operators, for operators.”

If you’d like to find out more about this project or what we do, click the button below!