The Huawei-initiated Open ROADS Community focuses on creating the ultimate customer experience
Telcos need to harness the power of cloud computing, the internet of things, mobile devices and big data, to re-orient their business operations and service delivery methods around all-digital channels. This allows them to generate insight and focus on their customers, and leverage these tools to enhance customer experience to ensure revenue and growth. This process is often known as digital transformation, and is challenging for telecom service providers—but crucial to their long-term competitiveness nevertheless.
How does a carrier successfully embark on the digital transformation process? Answering that question is the goal of the Open ROADS Community, a cross-industry forum initiated by leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider Huawei, launched this past February at Mobile World Congress 2016 in Barcelona, Spain. The Open ROADS Community has brought together dozens of global telecom industry stakeholders to incubate ICT transformation best practices. The Community’s acronym stands for five tenets which define the deep levels of personalization and quick service delivery expected by digital consumers today:
- Real-time service delivery and status updates help engage and delight subscribers. Service providers use real-time delivery to create new revenue streams, and right-time marketing efforts allow them to compete better against ‘over the top’ internet players.
- On-demand services support the always-on customer, and are customized for each application, ensuring that carriers can deliver bespoke connectivity, bandwidth, capacity and quality of service at scale.
- All-online services reflect user expectations of access at any time, from anywhere and on any device.
- Do-it-yourself services push engagement and create a frictionless experience.
- Social networking helps build brand loyalty, while creating an insightful pool of data.
Open ROADS community members work together to address some of the fundamental challenges associated with the digital transformation process. Members come from a range of industry sectors: telecom and digital service providers, IT solutions providers, industry forums and standardization bodies, universities, and consulting firms. Notable members include BT, GSMA, Harvard Business School, HKT, WPP, Ooredoo, SAP, STC, Sunrise, Telefonica, Orange, Vodafone, Warwick Business School and Huawei.
Members have convened twice in 2016: in Singapore in June, and recently in London on November 10 and 11. The London summit saw the launch of a cross-industry initiative aimed at developing standards, practices, an architecture and implementation references for cross-channel customer engagement within the telco industry: the Omni-channel Management Alliance.
“The launch of this ecosystem which brings together some of the biggest players in the telco industry,” Dr. Howard Liang, chairman of the Open ROADS community and a Huawei senior vice president, said, “This is the first business coalition incubated by the Open ROADS community. We think Omni-channel management can help operators deliver an actionable path for their digital transformation, by starting from the customer journey through merging legacy and new digital capabilities.”
As the telecom industry works toward digital transformation, lessons can be learned from other industries, Jim Lu, Huawei President of Global Technical Service, stressed during the London conference.
“Omni-channel management is the most powerful enabler of digital transformation,” he said. “Many enterprises from across a variety of vertical industries—such as retailers, airlines and financial service firms—have achieved remarkable results by adopting omni-channel management strategies, in order to speed up their time to market, heighten customer experience and improve customer lifetime value.”
To access the Open ROADS community catalog of white papers, reports, and presentations on such topics as smart cities and customer centricity, visit the group’s resource page.