With customers looking for more variety of digital services and content in our connected world, CSPs must make improvements to their infrastructure to add new online services and channels. It’s imperative they get to market quickly with these new services to stay relevant in a very competitive marketplace, among the many new players and with increasing threats from OTT service providers.
With the focus on digital growth across the CSP organization, there has been an increase in the number of stakeholders involved in product lifecycle and departments directly involved in planning, defining, and managing complex product portfolios. Additionally, the process is not only for stakeholders inside the company, but it now involves a growing network of partners and third-party service providers of digital services.
With these influences, some new challenges have been revealed related to effective Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). For example, the path from idea to product activation is error-prone. These errors from manual processes with poor governance cause the rollout of products to be lengthy and costly.
The increase in competitive pressures has heightened the need to differentiate product offerings. This requires more complex products to be rolled out quickly in reaction to the latest market trends. Without a streamlined PLM process, service providers are forced to release what product they can and not necessarily the new services their customers are looking for.
It’s important to not only be able to launch these services quickly but also to be able to effectively manage and control the entire lifecycle of these products. This is the key to delivering superior service quality and an exceptional customer experience and deterring customer churn for the new services along with the current traditional communication services they provide to the customer.
The solution to these new challenges lies in simplifying the behind-the-scenes product management systems and processes for the entire PLM cycle. Streamlining these ensures CSPs can expand the digital lifestyles of their customers and differentiate themselves from the intense competition of OTT and other service providers.
Working more and more with a larger ecosystem of third-party digital service providers and a variety of stakeholders, CSPs must incorporate new systems and processes into their own and be able to effectively manage these over the life of the service. Consistency, quality, and control are important to effectively manage the design, definition, publication, and phasing out of products. This will help to get to market quickly with new services and optimize product strategy, innovation, maturity, and exit.
To more effectively manage PLM in a complex digital world, CSPs need a solution that enables the management of the entire product lifecycle—from idea generation, design, development, testing, and activation to the retirement phase—with consistent product performance monitoring and reporting of relevant product data across all systems.
Greater value comes from real-time visibility of product lifecycle and performance that combines people, projects, workflows, technology, and data into a strategic approach for developing and managing products and their lifecycles. With more control of critical data, product development teams can accelerate their design change review cycle and simplify the transfer of design information to development and production. Marketing operations can react quickly to competition changes, enabling the creation of flexible bundles and combined products.
With effective PLM in place, CSPs can develop products faster and get to market quicker to remain competitive and capture revenue sooner. Through the benefits of increased process automation, CSPs gain full process insight and optimization so they can proactively act and monitor what is happening in real time with the PLM processes.
Having the ability to truly understand what is happening at every stage of the process in complex digital ecosystems helps CSPs introduce any products (i.e., combining traditional and partner services), quickly enabling seamless and personalized customer experiences across all channels.