Consumerization and the New World of Business Opportunity for Telcos

This consumerization trend offers telcos a new opportunity to take advantage of their unique command of customer channels. Telcos can address a fuller range of customers’ current digital needs by offering “consumerization as a service,” a subset of software as a service (SaaS) coupled with other managed services that give telcos a more central role in enabling employers to cope with the consumerization phenomenon.

By utilizing consumers’ digital footprints to target specific sales and service opportunities to their exact needs, telcos have the opportunity to provide customers with richer services; deliver enhanced convenience; and reclaim a more central role in the new, consumerized digital ecosystem.

Beyond Telco: The Consumerization of IT
Julie Stoughton, Senior Director of Communications Industry Marketing at SAP and Monte Hong, Global Lead for the Communications Practice at Accenture, discuss some of the major trends powering the shift in the Telco market.
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It’s clear that consumerization will be a key factor in workforce enablement and (for many companies) revenue generation. Employees are increasingly using their personal computing technologies for business purposes. Employers, after an initial period of confusion, are now responding with increasing flexibility and are working to accommodate this trend more proactively.

Consumers and businesses alike are increasingly open to using a wide array of applications and services that will deliver on the promise of consumerization by adding a new dimension of convenience and ease of access to content. Now, businesses need to be able to provide access to applications and services on whichever electronics devices their employees need.

To command a central role in realizing the promise of consumerization, telcos should consider offering “consumerization as a service”—a revenue-generating opportunity for use with their enterprise customers.

Consumerization as a service, while largely derived from software as a service (SaaS), also includes managed services, such as device management and technical support. Essentially, telcos can offer employers consumerization packages for enhanced ways of working together with their employees, offering customers the opportunity for their employees or customers to access an online suite of applications and services on demand, with the ability to be utilized on any device, at any scale.

Offering consumerization as a service will enable telcos to directly address the perceived opportunities and risks of consumerization. By providing services in this area, telcos can essentially become digital services providers, monetizing cloud-based services via broadband/mobile networks.

The new reality of consumerization offers potential opportunities for telcos seeking to reinvent themselves for the digital age. The key for telcos is thinking systematically about using consumers’ digital footprints to target specific sales and service and advertising opportunities to their exact needs, as well as the needs of their employers. Recommended strategies include:

• Have a clear view of what your customer proposition is in digital services—you need to have a strategy.

• Innovate—and to do so, take your insights not just from other telcos and media, but from other industries and emerging economies—i.e., think outside the telco “box.”

• Think about the ways in which consumers live and work in order to identify new opportunities for electronics devices and applications to make their lives more convenient.

• Make sure you articulate your innovations in terms of business benefits—not just as “cool stuff,” but as offering specific opportunities to generate revenue, market share and/or margin.

Montgomery (Monte) Hong is Accenture’s global Communications Industry practice lead and also the lead of Accenture Customer Operations Business Service.

Christopher Hinitt is Accenture’s Consumerization and Digital Media Capability lead in the UK/Ireland, and contributes to Accenture’s global approach and thought leadership to consumerization and social networking in the enterprise

Learn more about Accenture’s Customer Operations Services.