Billing & OSS World, Washington D.C. — Ever the straight shooter, Ibrahim Gedeon, CTO at Canadian operator TELUS, took to the keynote stage on Wednesday at the Billing & OSS World Conference in Washington D.C. to discuss customer-centricity, transformation and how to handle the subscriber’s identity, and didn’t hold back on his opinions. Especially when it comes to vendor pitches, and carriers’ role as providing pipes for applications.
“We’re in a situation where we’re doing everything right but yet we're not getting any benefits,” he said. “We did the IP transformation. We implemented wireless over MPLS. No one can say that TELUS hasn't been there at the forefront of wireless/wireline convergence. But guess what: who cares?”
The reason for the attitude is that he realized, he explained, that it’s not about the technology. It’s about being able to serve the customer as the customer would like to be served. And that’s an idea that requires much more than software and hardware. It’s a whole different attitude toward the subscriber identity.
Three months ago the carrier took its three business units (wholesale, SMB and consumer), and collapsed them all into one segment, filed under "customer."
“Vendors pitch what they want to sell us, not what we need to help us improve our business,” he explained. “We had three care systems, three ecosystems, three relevant vendors. And we had to align those into a single business unit in some tough slugging to rally around the customer. Vendors have appealed to our technical egos. They kill us: Every time I buy a best-in-class piece, I die. I love buying things that are fantastic, but the ecosystem has to work for us as a whole.”
The priorities for TELUS at the moment are customer service and allowing the network to enable the customer to interact with apps in the way that they wish. Collapsing the units allowed it to focus on those in a much more granular way.
“Just looking at services as services or segments won’t work, because services don’t model people,” Gedeon noted. “We got the SDP but it doesn't work for what we want to do.”
