Jack Welch, the business leader famed for his decades of service as CEO of GE, has said that there are only two sources of competitive advantage: identification of info about customers faster than competitor and putting insights into action faster than competitors.
It’s one of the main reasons why digital transformation has been a major trend across all industries for many years. It seems like almost every industry wants to use data collection as a means of developing or enhancing competitive advantage.
OSS and BSS can deliver systemic competitive advantage. But how?
When implemented well, OSS/BSS hold the key to unlocking both of these sources for network operators. When implemented sub-optimally, they can detract from a competitive advantage or deliver the advantage to competitors. Anyone who believes that OSS/BSS are simply cost centres that drain money from an organisation without delivering commercial benefit are missing this important point.
BSS collect and cross-reference incredibly detailed insights about customers. They aggregate important information such as:
- Customer details and profiles
- The services they’ve ordered (as well as changes over time)
- Their usage and spend patterns (also including changes over time)
- Their interactions with service providers, such as contacting call centres, interactions with carrier apps, etc
- In many cases, these interactions even include the reasons and / or root-cause of the interactions
- With help from the OSS, the BSS tools can also aggregate customer-impacting insights such as service health, outages, usage / billing discrepancies, etc
Better still, they collect information at almost instantaneous speeds, often automatically. You can’t get much faster than that. Almost any semi-competent OSS/BSS will ensure that point number 1 is well covered.
Faster data collect. Faster data insight. How your OSS/BSS can deliver on the only two competitive advantage sources
The difference between a well implemented OSS/BSS and a sub-optimal one comes down to the insights generated from the wealth of data collected. Even more important is for the OSS/BSS to make those insights simple to understand and implement.
This is where a solution like SunVizion thrives. It comes with OSS and BSS modules pre-integrated, meaning insights are already enriched across many different domains. There’s no need to integrate different products together and determine how they can cross-link and visualise information to derive insights. That cross-linking and presentation of data has already been done.
Two sources of competitive advantage. Do you or your competitors hold these advantages?
These insights have already been developed, refined and optimised to better meet the needs of various customers. As such, there’s no need to hypothesise or prototype. All the customer-related info is already available at your fingertips. New and configurable insights, dashboards, experiences and automations can also be easily developed on top of these existing capabilities.
Coming back to the second key differentiator, putting insights into action quicker than competitors, OSS and BSS solutions are designed to handle large data at scale and speed. Some derived insights are put into action manually. Others are done machine-to-machine (M2M), using automations, integrations and closed-loop feedback systems. At SunVizion, we design solutions with fast time to decision or time to action (TTD / TTA) in mind. Whether that’s via streamlined user interfaces (for manual-driven actions) or automations / integrations (for machine-driven actions).
The question to ask yourself is whether your current OSS and BSS solutions, when viewed from the perspective of end-to-end action / decision speeds, are giving you Jack Welch’s two sources of competitive advantage. Or does that advantage lie with your competitors?
