Table of Contents
AI-Optimized Operational Efficiency for Growth
Introduction
In last week’s DSP Leaders World Forum, I had the opportunity to be a panelist in a discussion on achieving maximum operational efficiency for service providers. Led by Chief Network Officer Iain Milligan of Three UK, the session focused on finding ways to overcome the challenges of low revenue growth and high capital expenditure in the telecom industry.
Positioning for Growth Opportunities
To maintain healthy EBIDTA margins, service providers need to think beyond their existing core telco services. During the session, we explored the possibility of leveraging investments made towards OSS/BSS integrations, introspection and observability, redundancy, and scale to get more out of 4G cores. By positioning themselves for growth opportunities, service providers can ensure long-term success. This requires a forward-thinking approach, considering where they want to be in five to 10 years and taking actions today to keep customers satisfied and loyal.
The Focus on Margins
For CTOs, focusing on margins is essential. This means keeping subscribers happy to reduce churn and finding ways to reduce operational expenses associated with inbound calls, customer care, payroll, and energy costs. Instead of chasing every issue that arises, CTOs should prioritize customer experience as their guiding principle. This means making strategic decisions on cost-cutting and investment based on how they will impact customer satisfaction and perception of the network and brand.
The Challenges of Traffic Growth
With the increasing demands of video streaming, remote work, cloud services, and interactive gaming, service providers face a growing challenge of resolving issues faster while maintaining high customer expectations. To tackle this challenge, optimization and automation are necessary. However, it’s important to strike a balance between optimization and flexibility, as excessive optimization can lead to a loss of flexibility.
Automation as a Strategic Play
Despite the challenges, automation remains a strategic play for driving down operational expenses over time. By focusing on major cost centers and processes such as customer care, operations, customer acquisition, and power consumption, service providers can identify opportunities for automation. However, successful automation requires good and clean data. Understanding how customers feel when using applications on the network is crucial for effective automation processes. Customer quality of experience becomes the North Star for driving automation and AI frameworks.
Embracing Iteration and Failure
It’s important to acknowledge that automation and AI projects may not succeed on the first try. It’s necessary to embrace a culture of iteration and failure in order to achieve quick time to value. This approach can be likened to Formula 1 racing, where teams make numerous changes to improve the car’s performance over the course of a season. Service providers should focus on getting value from automation and AI projects in weeks and months, rather than thinking in terms of years.
Key Variables for Capex Control
To effectively control capital expenditure and plan for upgrades, it’s crucial for service providers to continuously assess key variables that impact capex. These variables include app usage, IP traffic, subscriber growth, and bandwidth demand. Understanding these variables and their implications can enable service providers to adopt automated closed-loop approaches to capacity planning and network optimization.
Ensuring App Quality of Experience
When it comes to network upgrade strategies, app quality of experience should be the key factor, rather than simply focusing on capacity. Improving app quality of experience requires a long-term strategy that involves building data sources, data science teams, machine learning capabilities, and conducting NPS surveys. It’s important to view this as a continuous effort with tactical projects along the way.
Conclusion
AI-optimized operational efficiency is crucial for the growth of service providers in the telecom industry. By focusing on customer experience, prioritizing cost-cutting and investment decisions, and embracing automation and AI, service providers can position themselves for long-term success. Understanding key variables and continuously improving app quality of experience are essential components of this strategy. To learn more about how Sandvine can help with short-term and long-term goals regarding operational efficiency and app quality of experience, check out our resources and external links below.
Leave a Reply