Introduction

The entire gamut of business went through turmoil as soon as the pandemic hit the globe. However, amidst all these, the business world has also undergone some remarkable, unseen, and positive changes. Entrepreneurship picked up, remote work culture became the new normal, E-commerce scaled newer heights and what not! And all these have been possible due to the huge digital transformation that has been happening over the last few decades or basis the need that evolved due to the recent pandemic.

Well, when it’s about digital transformation, the telecom industry proved to be one sector that not only sparked the revolution, but has also been the flag bearer since long time now. To note here, telecom industry has almost become a synonym to this digital shift.

But then, this trajectory shift in digital space is the outcome of facing unknown or unheard challenges, overcoming them, and finally building robust technologies to bring in a digital revolution. In this blog, let’s have a look at some of the greatest challenges faced by the telecom industry and how it overcame them while maneuvering this remarkable digital transformation in real-time.

Challenges of Implementing Digital Transformation in Telecom Industry:

Challenge #1: Super Fast and Responsive Customer Service

While customers don’t like to wait in queues, customer service providers were not able to handle or respond to the large volumes of calls they received. Attending such humungous amount of calls and responding to them required large number of human resources, which again made the process cost-ineffective.

Solution #1: Putting Artificial Intelligence (AI) Into Customer Service

As a technology, AI has been developing competencies in telecoms. AI has changed the old school ways of attending customers, handling their queries, resolving them, and boosts customer engagement.

These days, businesses are focusing more to become an omni-channel contact centre platform software platform. Telecom industry is putting AI into customer service and engagement to make this happen across all levels. Virtual customer assistant, chatbots, and other AI powered tools are best examples of how telecom industry is making digital transformation a reality in today’s world.

Challenge #2: Handle Complex Business Processes

Business processes usually get more complex with the high influx of data. As the data flowing in spike up, processing them or extracting information out of them gets more complex. With only human computing abilities, handling this enormous amount of data is near to impossible. And once data is lost, businesses start losing their growth and revenue.

Solution #2: Machine Learning to Automate Businesses

Automating businesses was one of the greatest digital transformations in telecom industry. Here, Machine Learning (ML) initiated developing competencies in telecoms by empowering machines to learn on their own over time and process massive amount of data in no time. Furthermore, by developing advanced ML algorithms, telecom industry brought in a new digital transformation.

Challenge #3: Rise in Remote Working Culture

Remote working is the new normal and there is no denial about this! However, with the advent of this new normal, organizations started facing a new set of challenge – how to build a centralized work model wherein data can be made accessible to every employees, how to stay in sync with the employees sitting across different locations, or how to build a connection between employees and their devices.

Solution#3: Introducing Cloud Hosted Telephony Solutions

With these cloud hosted telephony solutions, organizations can now easily build a centralized data storage that can be managed and accessed from anywhere in world. Also, since data is stored in the cloud, it became easier for organizations to build a seamless human-device connection. By investing more on this cloud-hosted telephony solutions, service providers are bringing in a massive digital transformation in the telecom market.

Challenge #4: Rise of OTT (Over the Top) Platforms

OTT platforms started growing exponentially since last decade, thanks to the smart phone revolution! The arrival of WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Netflix, and others have affected the telecom sector in infinites ways. As a result, revenue generation in telecom market started dipping largely.

Solution#4: Develop Advanced Digital Content Delivery Network

Another milestone digital transformation in telecom market is the development of networks to deliver digital content. Telcos adhered to the rise of OTT platforms and started building cloud hosted telephony solutions through which digital content be distributed via high-speed broadband or Wi-Fi, or even through mobile data packs.

Challenge #5: Old School Legacy Systems

Legacy systems are traditional systems are either outdated or can no longer support the objectives of a business. Legacy systems proved to be one of the most challenging factors in the overall digital transformation of businesses. You can read more Legacy Systems

Solution#5: Modernizing Legacy Systems

The modernization of legacy systems is yet another remarkable digital transformation in telecom industry. The process requires reviewing and updating business requirements, which leads to assessing all the existing codes. Following this, advanced systems are developed to optimize overall operation and performance of a business. Even though this is quite a complex process, it ensures a high ROI to businesses.

How Unified Infotech Can Enable Telecom Clients Globally in Digital Transformation?

Well, these are just few pointers on how organizations in telecom industry are contributing to digital transformation in today’s era. In our next series of blogs, we would discuss more on this. However, if your business or organization is looking out for reliable, secured, and cost-effective telecom services, you must get in touch with United Infotech to hire some of the best industry experts. And while you get in touch with them, you can have a look at one of their recent case studies mentioned below:

• Service Industry Sector: Telecommunications and Network Services
• Client Requirement:

1. Solid or proven business consultation and planning.
2. Information architecture for website and mobile applications.
3. Compelling experience design that can fulfill customers’ needs.
4. Web development services to offer seamless user experience.

Challenges Faced By Client

Client wanted to develop a highly interactive website that would serve as a single touch point to cater to lead generation, validation of sales, and boost customer engagement. However, there were number of bottlenecks that were challenging the entire development process.

• Though the client had a decent visibility in the online market, their site was not an interactive one. It lacked all the aesthetics of designing with no branding elements in place. Hence, they had a high bouncing rate, and due to which their lead generation was getting negatively impacted.
• The user experience was quite outdated and failed tragically to keep the users or visitors engaged.
• Prospective customers find the website not worthy enough since there was a lack of navigational or structural integrity.

Solutions We Delivered

For all the projects we have handled so far, we first bifurcate the project so that we can walk into both organization’s and customer’s shoes. Following this, our team had a discussion with the client, and our core team started storyboarding followed by our ways of market research and creating discovery strategies. Competitor analysis was given higher priority to analyze the trend and get market insights, understand customers’ requirements to figure out the best practices to keep customers glued to the site.

• The site required functional information architecture – we addressed this as required.
• As we walk in the shoes of customers, we understand their pain points better. While beginning with the development process, we also considered the mental model guideline of the users along with organizational schema and structure. Following this, we developed accurate labeling & structure that will solve the problem of inconvenient navigation.
• Client had a highly exponential website. Hence, we had to make sure that the new platform we were building the site on should be scalable. And we achieved this we took leverage of an advanced third-party technology.
• Our next goal was to boost on-page traffic through standard SEO practices. As a result, there was an exponential increase in user engagement along with lead generation.
• The last step we followed was the trial and error check. As we approached towards the end, the client got established as one of the reputed telecom service providers.

The Final Outcome

• Being associated with United Infotech, client achieved more than 50% increase in user engagement.
• Lead generation skyrocketed to a greater height; credit goes to the upgraded navigation and information architecture.
• Our SEO and Schema strategies delivered a remarkable growth in web traffic for the client’s site.