Essential Guide: How B2B Telcos can scale and diversify in 2024

Last time, we demonstrated that in order for CSPs to provide an omnichannel experience and become more than connectivity providers, they need to implement a CPQ and OMS that provide great agility when it comes to commercial innovation, solution selling and scalability performance.

In part three, we focus on the 4 principles telco businesses and IT leaders need to consider when evaluating CPQ and OMS solutions in order to effectively achieve their transformation goals:

• Scalability
• Integration with service order management systems
• B2B telco capabilities
• Omnichannel support
  
  

Scalability: How to streamline the quoting process for large and complex orders

More than 50% of B2B enterprises¹ are reported to have sales processes that are not scalable. With the growing need to protect margins and maximize profits, this is simply not tenable. Scalability is vital to accommodate future growth and increased data processing demands. 

When looking at a CPQ and OMS solution, telcos need to ask themselves if the system is architected to process quotes and orders with thousands of line items. Unfortunately, a lot of organizations are unable to keep up with the number of moving parts within a system, leading to disjointed quote generations filled with errors. 

A scalable CPQ system can efficiently process quotes and orders with line items running into three, or even four, figures. Without scalability, the same system may struggle to handle large orders, leading to errors and delays in the quoting process. 

Even so, many vendor evaluations primarily focus on functionality rather than scalability. 

This oversight allows vendors to potentially overlook scalability issues, leading to untested systems that may fail to perform under real-world conditions. Without proper scalability testing, it's challenging to determine whether the CPQ can handle real-world demands effectively.

CloudSense addresses scalability concerns with an advanced microservices architecture that leverages AWS and Heroku. This setup allows for maximum scalability by distributing workload across multiple services, ensuring that the system can handle large orders without compromising performance. The system is designed to handle complex configurations and calculations quickly, ensuring fast response times and minimizing bottlenecks during peak usage. 

Through proactive monitoring and optimization, CloudSense ensures that the CPQ and OMS systems can scale seamlessly to meet growing demands without sacrificing performance or reliability. By ensuring the system can handle large orders efficiently, businesses can streamline the quoting process and deliver a seamless experience to their customers.

Integration with Service Order Management Systems

Commercial innovation is essential for telcos to stay competitive and meet evolving customer demands, and integration with Service Order Management systems is how they can avoid obstacles to this innovation. CloudSense's "Intelligent decoupling" architecture enables agility by separating the commercial catalog from the technical aspects of the system.

Many telcos have faced challenges due to tightly linked commercial and technical layers. While this approach may seem logical, it results in significant administrative development and testing overhead whenever there’s a product change, hindering commercial innovation.

To achieve commercial innovation, a decoupled architecture is necessary. This allows for fast, agile commercial changes while still providing the necessary payloads that the Service Order Management system requires for provisioning.

In order to avoid any pitfalls, it’s crucial to establish architectural principles. CloudSense’s architecture insulates the commercial catalog from the technical aspects, enabling agility and facilitating commercial innovation.

B2B Telco Capabilities: The importance of choosing a system that is purpose-built for your industry

When looking at whether a CPQ and OMS system is suitable for B2B telcos, it is important to consider if the system is built to handle common B2B telco capabilities and required business processes. Many vendors that are not focused on B2B telcos can overlook the complexity and scale that comes with selling, fulfilling and managing B2B orders and subscriptions. 

These can include:

• Generating quick or budgetary quotes within minutes
• Configuring multi-site quotes and orders 
• Supporting multiple product variants
• Quickly evaluating deal profitability and viability

Standard telco business processes should be included in the vendor scorecard to evaluate them accurately. It’s essential to ask vendors to demonstrate their capabilities. If these capabilities are not included in the standard demo, it may be difficult or impossible for them to implement them later on. 

It is also essential to evaluate how each vendor enables agile product management beyond a standard demo. This requires a detailed demonstration of design time and run time functionalities, including configuring and launching new products, bundles, promotions and demonstrating the order lifecycle processes.

For over a decade, CloudSense has been focused on B2B telco, ensuring that these capabilities are pre-configured and ready to implement, providing a robust solution tailored to the needs of the industry.

Omnichannel Support: How to deliver a seamless customer experience across all channels

Omnichannel support is crucial for delivering a seamless customer experience, and while it depends on scalability and other factors, it plays a pivotal role in ensuring consistent ordering journeys across multiple channels. 

To achieve true omni-channel functionality, CPQ and commercial order management systems must allow for separate customer journeys that leverage the same data in real time. A solution’s APIs need to effectively manage the scale and complexity required for omnichannel support. It is essential that a business implements a system that considers various complex journeys customers may undertake through multiple channels.

CloudSense's Digital Commerce APIs enable true omnichannel experiences, allowing for consistent ordering journeys across multiple channels. It’s designed to enable omnichannel experiences by facilitating seamless customer interactions, regardless of the path the client chooses to engage through.

Through offering an “omni-cart” that can be accessed wherever and whenever throughout the customer ordering journey, this capability ensures a seamless experience for both new and existing customer orders and changes, regardless of the channel for chosen engagement.

In summary, Telco CPQ and commercial order management projects must prioritize scalability, integration, B2B telco capabilities and omnichannel support to succeed in delivering value to telco businesses, and CloudSense offers solutions tailored to address these challenges and drive successful outcomes.

1; Pros AI, 2022