Summary Bullets:
- OSS/BSS suppliers need to enlist third parties, such as enterprise and SMBs, to partner on attractive use cases that demonstrate near-term return on investment (ROI) opportunities associated with using digital storefront business rules that aid operators in their drive to manage the omni-channel customer experience and advance their goal of monetizing digital service offerings.
- Through embedded API incentives, OSS/BSS suppliers can boost operator goals to drive partners to adopt digital storefront business rules that remove technical and business logic barriers in creating consistent omni-channel customer experiences.
Operators are poised to invest more resources in finding ways to differentiate their services further while also streamlining their overall costs in areas such as operational expenditure (OpEx) reduction. Through defining and developing the omni-channel experience of their customers, OSS/BSS suppliers can strengthen the operator potential to drive the overall management of the customer experience. However, accomplishing these twin goals presents distinct barriers for the suppliers and their operator customers.
What are the key barriers to enabling operators to energize wider acceptance of omni-channel business logic for digital applications?
- Storefront Data Business Logic: A consistent obstacle for operators in rendering across-the-board and consistent omni-channel customer experiences pertains to the specific data rules of the various individual digital storefronts. Frequently, the inflexibility of the front-end storefront in working with other systems prevents operators from advancing omni-channel consistency due to the self-contained business logic of the digital storefront. As a result, OSS/BSS supplier tools, including robust APIs that support omni-channel applications, can prove limited in reconciling digital storefront business rules across distinct device types.
- Ecosystem Influence: OSS/BSS suppliers as well as operators currently lack the digital platform tools needed to incent the vast ocean of digital storefront proprietors to adopt business logic rules that consistently accommodate and anticipate omni-channel use cases. Although most OSS/BSS suppliers provide open APIs that support multi-device subscriber interaction apps, some operators have not adopted these capabilities for omni-channel apps. Thus, many customers can continue to experience a wide yet disparaging customer experience of the same storefront depending on the touchpoint or device they are using.
With the combination of inflexible digital storefront business logic and fragmented ecosystem support for omni-channel business logic, how can OSS/BSS suppliers and operators change the game?
- Modify Pay Models: OSS/BSS suppliers need to augment their existing platforms and solutions with embedded omni-channel open API capabilities. With operators shifting toward digital business models that enable third parties to prioritize and differentiate their digital content, including content provider pays, advertiser pays, and partnership pays implementations, OSS/BSS suppliers gain an emerging opportunity to drive digital storefront business logic to natively support omni-channel capabilities. Built-in omni-channel properties can help differentiate digital storefronts while enabling operators to create value for their digital commerce partners. Likewise, suppliers and operators need to identify the best omni-channel candidates generated via advertiser pull through volumes that strengthen the business case to implement omni-channel capabilities for the retail customers.
- Diversify API Channel Adoption: OSS/BSS suppliers driving open API adoption of omni-channel tools and capabilities need to diversify the range of adopters. The current approach of using open API demos purpose-designed for omni-channel apps to spur operator adoption can generate incremental progress. This approach can particularly yield omni-channel use-case breakthroughs, especially when analytical tools link the omni-channel capabilities to monetization benefits. Additionally, OSS/BSS suppliers with direct enterprise channels, such as Oracle, Huawei, and NEC/NetCracker, should emulate and step up the embedded omni-channel API demos for large enterprises to ease digital ecosystem adoption of omni-channel-compatible business rules across an expanding range of digital storefronts.
Through driving and defining the omni-channel experience of their customers, OSS/BSS suppliers and their operator customers strengthen their position for successfully pursuing the dual goals of streamlining OpEx while also further differentiating their overall customer experience. The key to success resides with exercising the ecosystem influence needed to accelerate organic operator and enterprise adoption of digital commerce storefronts with built-in omni-channel APIs.