Why a telco-grade commerce app is a must for every service provider today

In their quest to build on their superior connectivity, CSPs are looking to bundle in advanced services that will allow them to appeal and retain desired segments. Establishing partnerships with third-party providers for bringing innovative digital services that go beyond the traditional offering is a key strategy. 

When adopting new approaches, CSPs encounter a significant challenge in enabling the flexibility demanded. This includes the capacity to easily create bundled digital services, deploy innovative business models and offer a range of payment options. While incumbent, general-purpose commerce applications may be able to address the need for increased flexibility, they lack the specialized capabilities required for the telecoms’ complexities  

To overcome these challenges and succeed at fueling growth, a commerce app that is telco-grade, unified, and which comes with built-in flexibility is the answer. 

Why a general-purpose commerce app won’t do

A general-purpose commerce app can’t accommodate for the specific telco reality with its many and complex interdependencies of eligibility and product, services, and customer dynamic compatibility, lifecycles and hierarchies. It much more then add an item to cart and ship.  

There are ongoing product replacements and service amendments, suspensions, and cancellations. There are also multiple systems and hierarchies involved in activating and delivering what may seem like a ‘simple service.’ And that’s just for starters.

But even at the most basic level, a general-purpose app can’t support the various commerce use cases that nearly every service provider must account for today, for example:

• Correlating the customer’s location to the network servicing them for making the right offer, e.g., offering fiber to the home for customers in remote locations with fiber coverage vs. 5G over wireless for those areas where 5G has been rolled out.
• Creating contextualized offers based on which services and products are currently in the customer’s package for optimizing a mix-and-match family plan, for example.
• Managing an array of sales journeys to accommodate shifting customer behaviors.  
• Enabling flexible bundling offers with different LoBs and partners from adjacent industries.  
• Considering dependencies among products and services.  

What makes for a commerce app that is telco-grade  

First, a telco-grade commerce app is about providing an end-to-end solution for telco commerce activities, covering all needs from offer design and creation, through end-user sales and shopping experience orchestration, to delivery and fulfillment, and doing so across multiple channels and services, including (and especially) the new ones enabled by digital partnerships.

Next, it entails applying advanced AI for optimizing offer recommendations across the broad range of scenarios and use cases, such as those mentioned above.

And finally, it includes bringing the seven key capabilities that fuel digital commerce.  

The 7 key capabilities  

A telco-grade commerce solution should support integration with existing business systems such as billing and care for harmonizing data and centralizing management to facilitate order processing across all systems with consistency and precision.

The seven key capabilities of a powerful telco-grade commerce solution are integral to driving success and innovation in today’s digital marketplace.  

Curious about these capabilities? Each one is explored in-depth in our whitepaper, which outlines not only the capabilities themselves but also the specific needs they address and a variety of sample use cases demonstrating their practical application.

The benefits of being telco-grade  

A telco-grade commerce app enables CSPs to overcome some of its key challenges to being a digital services provider.

But delivering on expectations, and ensuring customer retention, new customer acquisition, product and service differentiation, and promotion optimization requires the commerce app to also be unified and to come with built-in flexibility.

To learn more about these two additional, strategically important pillars, we invite you to read our latest whitepaper, “Reimagining Commerce for Telecommunications: Personalizing Journeys, Transforming Experiences,”.