When you take a hard look at the demands of end customers, you’ll find that their expectations for service quality are increasingly being driven not by operators, but by leading non-telco digital players like Google and Amazon. These cloud-born conglomerates are able to offer dynamic, automated and intelligent purchasing experiences that connect ‘Generation Cloud,’ on both the consumer and enterprise sides, with the impressive new digital services they crave.
Are operators prepared to deliver a comparable or superior buying experience? Technology advancements in the telco back office – namely, the introduction of network function virtualisation (NFV) into the infrastructure – offers promise that operators will be able to deliver relevant digital services to B2B and B2C customers at the right moment and in the right context.
However, how do you actually leverage NFV to re-imagine service delivery? Operators should look to re-model their service orchestration approach to support an abstracted, composable digital service lifecycle – one that also views virtual functions as digital services that can be configured and sold.
With that in mind, operators ought to give serious consideration to a three-tiered system that not only allows them to quickly configure, launch and create digital services, but also enables self-service configuration – crucial at a time when customers want more power and customised offerings.
NFV’s Potential in the Digital Economy
You don’t have to look far to see evidence of today’s digital service transformation. Consumers love the buying experience they enjoy from top ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon, eBay and the upstart Jet.com. Leading brands let you customise everything from a pair of shoes to a new car online, without ever speaking to a sales associate. But operators don’t always offer the same experience. One survey found that 65 percent of consumers struggle to find a mobile data package that fully meets their needs.
Higher expectations for service convenience and configurability spill over into B2B sales. Traditionally, an enterprise looking to add on a new IT or communications service must proceed through a linear purchase process that’s bogged down by lengthy requirements reviews, proposals and bids. Despite attempts to meet unique customer needs, this experience often results in broad, generic IT implementations that arrive much later than expected. To offer faster service delivery and a more satisfying B2B customer experience, operators must undergo an enterprise sales transformation.
The focus on speed and configurability will only increase alongside the emerging influence of the Internet of Things (IoT). With 50 billion connected devices expected to come online by 2020, the scope and complexity of our digital service economy will only grow.
NFV doesn’t only empower operators with the infrastructure agility and flexibility to re-engineer their service delivery frameworks for this new economy. As analyst Caroline Chappell of Heavy Reading explains, it also means operators can sell actual virtual functions to customers as a configurable digital service. Those functions are, after all, nothing more than software components running in the cloud like any other digital service.
This reveals the two new roles NFV allows operators to play: digital service aggregators and virtual network service providers. With help from third-party providers, operators can set up the marketplaces where all kinds of consumers can purchase digital services. At the same time, telcos connect B2B consumers with the virtual functions they need to provision their own networks. Operators can achieve this agile approach to service composition and delivery through a more dynamic service orchestration model.
Reimaging Service Delivery for Speed, Configurability and Accuracy
This NFV-driven model requires three layers: one for resource management, one for digital service lifecycle management and one for business management.
The business management layer sits at the top and includes the actual shopping environment, order configuration and payment tools. Automated ordering and billing solutions ensure the requests made by customers at this level can be passed on down the line for configuration and fulfillment quickly.
The digital service lifecycle layer sits in the middle, comprising the service orchestration environment and catalog that manage service composition. At this level, each new customer order is automatically checked for feasibility and availability, based on digital service definitions, service level agreements and inventory. That improves order quality and eliminates false service availability promises, which cuts down on customer dissatisfaction and the risk of order fallouts.
The resource management layer sits at the bottom and includes the infrastructure management tools and controllers that support physical and virtual network functions. When a customer inquiry for a new digital service arrives, this layer determines how best to deploy resources to fulfill that request.
With this NFV-driven model, operators can offer B2C and B2B customers alike a fast, accurate and automated, self-service buying experience. The digital catalog can be scaled to include any new service, from your standard consumer or business IT and communications services, to network functionality, to IoT connectivity, to third-party SaaS solutions. That means operators can add to their capabilities as the digital economy grows and consumer demand evolves.
Getting to the Heart of Customer Needs
Operators may have a general idea where the industry is heading in the next decade or more, but with specifics still hazy, flexibility is a major asset. That’s why NFV is so appealing in the first place – a nimble infrastructure allows operators to pivot toward new service offerings quickly. But NFV is more than a technology story.
In the course of transforming their networks, operators must not forget the business proposition for NFV: its potential to change how we serve customers. Buyers want more power and personalisation, and NFV can help you deliver that. But you must build a conversational and automated service delivery framework that makes it easy and enjoyable for these customers to engage with your business.
