Telco Product Compatibility: Tips for Efficiency and Accuracy
In today’s highly competitive market, businesses are continuously expanding their portfolios to offer a diverse range of products and services tailored to meet the specific needs of their customers. Hidden beneath the surface of seamless connectivity and diversification, telcos face the trickiest customer of all: product compatibility.
Now more than ever, telcos must manage compatibility of a diverse range of products and services, and maintain operational efficiency to keep customers satisfied.
The Compatibility Challenge
Customer needs are not only rising, but are also becoming complex. Today’s customers expect a variety of choices to meet their specific needs. This coupled with the increased competition in the industry, forces sales reps to offer unique mixtures of products and services.
Unfortunately, everytime a new product or service is introduced, a new layer of complexity emerges. This is especially evident during business diversification efforts, where telcos are offering new products and services that don’t necessarily fit the same category.
A telco provider may offer a combination of internet, phone and TV packages, each with various options. Ensuring these packages work together and do so seamlessly with the customer’s existing services requires careful and precise configuration.
The Burden on Sales Teams
Without a system in place, the risk of errors increases significantly. Salesforce1 found that sales reps spend 28% of their time on selling, leaving the rest of their time on things like compatibility checks.
Ensuring compatibility between products and services can require extensive research and manual verification by sales reps, and distract them from their primary role of engaging with customers and driving sales.
Without an automated system sales teams must rely on their own research and judgment to ensure that products are configured correctly. This manual process increases the likelihood of mistakes, as it’s difficult to verify all possible configurations without the right support.
The Hidden Costs of Inaccurate Orders
The hidden costs of inaccurate orders lies in fixing mistakes, handling returns, and compensating customers add up quickly. With operators already under pressure2 to maintain a tight grip on spending, this is not an ideal situation.
Despite best efforts from sales teams to ensure compatibility, inaccuracies in orders can still arise. The combination of a wide range of products and services can become overwhelmingly complex. With each product having its own dependencies, order inaccuracies can arise if incompatible products or services are selected.
Order inaccuracies can also arise in the presence of a system that is reliant on manual work. When sales reps manually configure orders, human errors can arise. Even with extensive knowledge, sales reps may overlook or misunderstand certain compatibility requirements.
In the hyper-competitive telco industry, customer satisfaction stands out as a key factor that differentiates leading telcos from the rest. Incorrect orders lead to manual rework and delays to correct any mistakes. This in turn leads to significant customer dissatisfaction, eroding trust and loyalty. Customers are then more likely to turn to competitors who can meet their needs more efficiently and effectively.
The CloudSense Compatibility Rules Service
To address these challenges, telcos need tools that are designed to ensure that every order is accurate and compatible with the customer’s needs.
CloudSense’s Compatibility Rules Service (CRS) ensures that all items in a given solution work together seamlessly by providing clear indicators whenever a configured product is incompatible with others.
CRS ensures delivery accuracy by providing instant compatibility verifications for orders at any level of complexity. In doing so, sales processes are streamlined eliminating the need for extensive research on complex order. CRS ensures order accuracy, eliminates rework and prevents customer dissatisfaction.
The result? A more efficient, profitable, and customer-centric business that is well-positioned for success in today’s dynamic market.
1; Salesforce, 2023, 2; Telco Titans, 2023
