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As market trends and customer demands change, large telecommunications companies may struggle to deliver profitable growth. Sébastien Meeus, a partner with Bain's Telecommunications practice, discusses how a simple and digital approach can help telcos revamp their operations.
Read the Bain Brief: Simple and Digital Is Calling—Will Telcos Answer?
Read the transcript below.
SEBASTIEN MEEUS: Most telecom players today face significant challenges as we speak. So customer needs and customer expectations are changing quite rapidly. Competition is also evolving and increasing quite substantially as well. So as a result of that, there is actually a lot of telecom players that have failed to deliver profitable growth in a sustainable way.
At Bain, we believe that if you want to counter that, you actually need to embrace a simple and digital agenda. And simple and digital, I think the two words are quite important. Simple, because you want to take out all the complexity you have in your business. And digital speaks for itself.
This will entail revamping the full commercial engine. Number one, the products—moving to a future-proof product portfolio, moving away from legacy, the number of products, but also beyond that, the legacy platforms. And then also, all the rules that create a lot of complexity—discounts, promotions, campaigns.
So next to that, customer experiences and journeys. That's really the heart of the commercial engine, making sure we deliver a seamless experience for when customers want to join, when they need to pay their bills, when they need to actually get help, making that very seamless and swift for the customers and for our own employees.
And then last but not least, the channels, moving to a multichannel environment. Digital first, so a great website, great app, of course. But beyond that, also some of the latest digital tools and techniques. And the bot is probably one of the better examples of that.
So what we've seen is when our clients embrace a simple and digital agenda and revamp their core commercial engine, [there are] actually material benefits—significant improvement in revenues, cost reductions attached to that, and a big improvement in customer experience.
Frédéric Debruyne: Simple and Digital Transformation in Telecom
For telcos, successful transformations can reduce costs and improve customer experiences.
Simple and Digital Is Calling—Will Telcos Answer?
By eliminating complexity and embracing digital, telcos can improve customer experiences, cut costs and boost revenue.