Decades of experience with communications enterprises worldwide are the basis for this compilation of thought-leadership papers by EDS executives who serve the communications industry. The papers address key challenges Communications Service Providers (CSPs) face and recommend initiatives for resolving them.
EDS believes CSPs can offer a superior customer experience and build sustained customer loyalty by going to market with products and services more quickly and efficiently. But to do so, CSPs must commit to a transformational journey that will ultimately result in customer satisfaction and revenue growth.
This insightful book explains how a CSP can reshape its business model and IT environment to achieve significant business results.
René J. Aerdts, Ph.D, is an EDS fellow. He is in the Information Technology Outsourcing (ITO) Service Delivery organization, which is responsible for the IT service delivery. He has over 20 years of experience in IT.
Andreas G. Bauer is the global leader of Communications Industry Frameworks in EDS Portfolio Development. He has over 18 years of experience in business consulting and technology enablement.
Max R. Speur is the Asia-Pacific Communications Industry leader for EDS. He has significant international business transformation experience in the communications industry in both Europe and Asia Pacific.
Additional authors include communications industry thought leaders from across the globe: Alberto Balestrazzi, Sebastião M. Burin, Jürgen Donnerstag, Vinod Krishnan, Paul M. Morrison, Renato Osato, Timothy C. Samler, Harvey R.A. Stotland and Tara L. Whitehead.
This book provides the reader with our point of view on how Communications Service Providers (CSPs) should transform to achieve a series of objectives, from sustaining cost containment to improving the customer experience and loyalty to igniting top-line growth.
The book explains the foundation needed to enable a successful transformation, describes initiatives to create a superior customer experience and discusses our view on how to turn that experience into sustained customer loyalty and revenue growth. Each paper is self-contained to give readers the choice to focus on their particular areas interest.
We have organized the book into four parts, each of which looks at this transformation from a different angle. Each part contains a collection of thought-leadership papers that express our views on current topics.
Part I
Part I is about the foundational initiatives needed to enable a successful transformation. We frequently find that CSPs are bogged down by a myriad of inhibitors to transformation, many of which have been created over decades—the so-called legacy environment that tends to create barriers to change and puts the CSP at a cost disadvantage. Part I is about the initiatives a CSP needs to implement in order to transform its legacy environment systematically. We look beyond the low-hanging fruit and envision a program designed to improve the cost economics in a sustainable way and to lay the foundation for a successful business transformation. Business transformation may come in various forms and may affect different aspects of the legacy environment. The papers in Part I cover some of them.
…
Part II
The papers in Part II are about creating points of differentiation in an industry characterized by increasingly commoditized products. In our view, which is shared by many CSPs, creating a superior customer experience is key to differentiation.
…
Part III
Part III is about transforming for loyalty and growth. Certainly, a poor customer experience will often cause a customer to switch to a competitor. But in our view, a superior customer experience alone is not sufficient to retain customers. Today’s consumers are all too often attracted by lower price points on similar services or by heavy subsidies on the latest handsets. In our opinion, it takes more than just subsidies, price cuts or loyalty programs to create sustained growth and customer loyalty. CSPs need an ecosystem of partners who jointly create a superior and attractive customer value proposition, building on the unique strengths of each partner. In addition, the underlying enabling technology needs to be put in place as well.