A Five-Point BSS Checklist for 5G Digital Leadership

Digital leaders apply bold and disruptive thinking to shake up markets, grab the imagination of consumers and drive new ways of thinking about longstanding legacy businesses. This characteristic is essential for telcos if they want to push through a saturated market and dominate the industry. But, to be successfully executed, boldness must be backed by a tactically aligned and functional capability.

For telcos, the combination of confidence and capability begins with the BSS. However, a digitally disruptive approach in the market can’t succeed if it’s backed by systems designed for the retail approach and limited customer expectations of 15 or 20 years ago. While many of today’s leading telcos are embracing the principles of modern digital commerce — real-time interaction across multiple digital channels, transparency, now-payment and more — they struggle to execute that vision with systems that were designed to support bricks-and-mortar retail and paper bills.

If the BSS is to support the digital aspirations of emerging and evolving digital telcos, then it has to change. A modern BSS must have:

1. CLICK–NOT-CODE/CONFIGURATION-BASED PRICING

Digital consumers move fast. Digital commerce needs to move faster. New products and services should go from idea to market-readiness in days or even hours. A business can’t afford its BSS platform to obstruct this agility, or to create a costly and complex customization bottleneck in its product and service roadmap.

Critical success factors:

• A product-based solution that will support 90% of foreseeable use cases out of the box through straightforward configuration
• A no-customization philosophy that enables rapid deployment of the BSS and rapid launch of market propositions
• A single solution for all customers that enables innovation through configuration

2. FLEXIBLE SUPPORT FOR ALL BUSINESSES ON A SINGLE CODE BASE

Future telcos won’t be a rigid, vertically integrated business. As they seek to maximize their returns on 5G and other infrastructure investments, many telcos are investigating new lines of business that will address a wide range of non-consumer markets. Others are working with partners to develop innovative B2B2X propositions.

Tomorrow’s BSS will need to recognize and support this more volatile and less predictable business environment. A BSS designed for a simple network-to-consumer model, as almost all legacy BSS was in the past, will struggle to adapt.

Critical success factors:

• Supports innovation and expansion into different businesses and industry verticals, without requiring costly customization or a new solution to support every venture
• Reduces the BSS overhead associated with rolling out new lines of business

3. ALL-DIGITAL USER JOURNEYS

Today’s consumers are rapidly dispensing with the physical trappings of yesterday’s customer experience. Few require paper bills or visits to stores; fewer still have the patience to wait on hold to talk to CSRs.

The rising generation wants to buy and self-configure products and services fast, through an online app that is consistent across all digital channels, and to have problems and queries resolved quickly through the same channels. The good news is that an all-digital approach is not only preferred by the customer — but it’s cheaper and more efficient for the telco too.

Critical success factors:

• A fully digital, omnichannel customer lifecycle that delivers the best possible customer experience
• Greatly reduced customer support costs and overhead

4. HIGH-SPEED TPS/ULTRA-LOW LATENCY (ULL) PERFORMANCE

5G will generate network events and transactions in volumes that greatly exceed the outputs from previous generations of mobile data networks. As 5G rollout and customer adoption accelerate, future BSS needs to be able to scale up to support exponential growth in traffic and event processing requirements.

Critical success factors:

• Capability to support an exponentially expanding volume of transactions on a lightweight footprint with 100% accuracy and no loss of data
• Near-instant response times in support of 5G network ULL performance

5. CLOUD NATIVE ARCHITECTURE FOR WEB-SCALE ELASTICITY & RESILIENCE

5G success will depend on supporting systems that deliver unimpaired business and network agility. The coming explosive growth in devices, services and traffic demands the agility, availability and scalability that only a standards-compliant cloud native architecture can deliver.

Critical success factors:

• Elasticity to support a stand-up/tear down philosophy towards network right-sizing and resource optimization, allowing rapid experimentation and personalization at scale
• Process automation for efficiency, resiliency and scalability
• Auto-healing for consistency of performance

Digital leaders disrupt their markets and drive the uptake of digital commerce. They need to be supported by systems that provide flexibility, high performance and meet the customer’s need for transparency and control. Only a fully integrated convergent charging and monetization platform that seamlessly connects the control plane and the customer UX will do this.

5G success will be driven by inspirational product and service ideas that leverage the technology’s unique qualities and characteristics. They need to be underpinned by monetization capabilities and a BSS design philosophy that will provide a springboard from which those ideas can fly.

Above are five key capabilities that are essential to maximize revenue from 5G technology and new services. How many can you check off?

For more on how MATRIXX can help you achieve your 5G monetization goals, check out our Playbook for 5G Monetization today.