Fourteen services for CSPs to look for in an open marketplace

“Open” and “Innovation” unfortunately have been transformed into widely used buzzwords that are likely to generate eye rolls from Communications Service providers (CSPs) who are repeatedly bombarded with marketing messages that are hard to decipher.

Open and Innovation in name alone do not address the challenges and opportunities CPSs face every day. According on one recent survey, CSPs are lagging behind to develop the business-to-business (B2B) solutions that are critical to the commercial success of 5G.

More than ever, CSPs need to move faster by adapting to market conditions that have changed more in the past four months then in the past four years. The next four month are likely to be equally disruptive. 

In its simplest form, innovation is changing the established norm to improve it. Open Architectures are void of the traditional walls and barriers that have limited CSPs ability to innovate. The more open an environment is for companies, partners, and individuals to share knowledge and resources the greater the opportunity is to deliver innovative applications and solutions.

This mean access and compatibility. No single vendor can deliver everything CSPs need to drive revenue, reduce costs, retain existing customers, and convert new ones. 

CSPs need access to a wide range of products and services to build and launch new services quickly that capitalize on emerging Cloud, 5G, NaaS, and Edge trends to grow new revenue streams.

One emerging concept to help CSPs achieve this are marketplaces based on open architectures. When done correctly, marketplaces offer an ecosystem for CSPs, technology partners, and industry forums to innovate faster and harvest unique solutions.

Marketplaces can enable businesses with the agility to quickly adapt to changing customer demands and business priorities. They can provide CSPs with tools, accelerators, and resources to build and launch new services and cross industry offerings, helping them capitalize on emerging trends and to grow new revenue streams.

Marketplaces ease the burden of quickly assembling new services by pre-integrating offerings from multiple vendors to deliver.

Intelligent and comprehensive offerings including application programming interfaces (APIs), artificial intelligence (AI) models, augmented reality (AR), know your customer (KYC), integrated billing, and network inventory can redefine digital experiences, create intent-driven engagements, improve quality of service, and monetize assets.

Here are 14 services CSPs should look for when evaluating marketplaces:

1. Billing Automation – Overlay platform integrates with multiple billing systems, automates reconciliations, and provides analytics, interactive bill presentment, and video bill experience.
2. Cognitive Network Decisioning – Overlay platform integrates with multiple network management systems to deliver a global single network view and intelligence to drive auto decisioning.
3. Digital Experience Layer – Unified platform enabling consistent channel experience, seamless handoffs, and standard microservice APIs across customer touchpoints.
4. Digital Marketplace – Ecosystem for CSPs pre-integrated with digital providers and adjacent marketplace players to offer a single identity, product bundles, and offers. 
5. Digital Self Care – Empowers customers to self-install, test, diagnose, and resolve issues through an AR and AI-powered chatbot integrated with an API and knowledge hub.
6. Intelligent BPA – Eliminates manual touchpoints on 60+ processes across contact center, billing, network rollout, network operations, and service and order fulfillment operations through intelligent automation.
7. Interactive Retail – AI-driven conversational digital wall with facial recognition and lift and learn product simulations features for improved explore and buy journeys at retail outlets.
8. Location-based Marketing – Cloud-based CSP platform integrating with retail brands enabling customer segmentation, target audience campaign configuration, and location-based offers.
9. Network-as-a-Service – Open API-based platform to deliver on-demand cloud network provisioning to establish global connectivity and security services at scale.
10. NextGen Contact Center – Cognitive compute-based contact center solution enabling agents to provide improved customer service using insights-driven operations and smart business widgets.
11. Small Cell Orchestration – Intent-based network operations solution uses catalogs with business KPIs to automate network commissioning, provisioning, and assurance enabling dynamic optimization of network.
12. Smart Field Force Management – AR and AI-powered remote test and diagnostic capability, helping engineers to identify the location of main fault, analyze impact, and recommended resolution steps.
13. Subscriber 360 – Dynamic, unified view of subscriber profile with micro-segmentation, providing predictions and recommendations on customer Average Revenue Per User, Customer Lifetime Value, Churn, Net Promoter Score, and Customer Satisfaction Index.
14. Unified Network Inventory – Cloud-based single inventory solution built on a graph database to manage logical and physical resources enabling network automation through NetSecOps.

CSPs need to move faster than ever. IT vendors who promise a one stop shop to meet every need represent a growing red flag.  Increasingly, marketplaces will offer higher quality of pre-integrated solutions from multiple vendors. Open architectures will be key to delivering them.