Bringing the Front and Back Offices Together

By Brian Kracik

In today’s fast-paced world, expectations are high and customers crave instantaneous communication. The Internet, smartphones, and mobile apps whet the appetite and leave customers still wanting more. They demand top quality and instantaneous service from all service providers across all industries – banks, automotive, medical, mobile providers, etc.

This means that communications service providers (CSPs) are under constant pressure to provide the highest quality customer service, while working to quickly release new products and offers. They must ensure they can quickly and reliably deliver on their promises.

To meet these lofty goals while keeping costs down, CSPs must work to streamline the customer-facing and back-office operations that manage offer creation and order delivery – which is no easy feat. These processes have historically been separate and filled with inefficiencies that have resulted in offer creation cycles as long as 18 months and millions of dollars lost to order fallout each year. In today’s fierce communications market and tough economic climate, the status quo is simply not sustainable.

Cost-effective offer creation and order delivery is possible if you break down the silos and bring these processes together to create a dynamic centralized management engine. With an integrated solution, CSPs can achieve quick time to market and ensure accurate, timely order delivery.

For example, within the offer creation process, communications service providers should establish a central product catalog to define offers and automate updates to ensure changes are made across the CRM, billing and order management systems. Next, they need an integrated and synchronized approach to mapping and testing new offers, breaking down the silos that have caused the fragmented process-driven approach in use today. Finally, CSPs must develop a “zero configuration” environment to create more of the same offers faster and enable re-use of order fulfillment flows. These changes will enable CSPs to cost-effectively accelerate offer introduction, reducing it to a few weeks or even days, which is vital to keeping up with competing products, pricing and bundles.

An integrated solution will also enable a smooth delivery process from the moment the customer places the order by providing the ability to track order progress and automatically update changes. This complete order life cycle view ensures that CRM representatives can immediately see and inform customers of the order status and projected delivery times.

Further, through the development of a dynamic order management engine integrating the front- and back-office, CSPs can ensure an efficient, flexible fulfillment process and the ability to make low-cost, in-flight changes to a customer order. This is significant as most CSPs currently manage this process with a large number of manual workarounds that drive up costs. Automation and increased accuracy will significantly reduce order errors and fallout.

A great example of an integrated offer creation and order delivery process comes from Aircel, a wireless leader in the rapidly growing Indian communications market. The provider needed a solution that could manage the large volume of products and offers it wanted to introduce, but struggled with inefficient and fragmented processes. By bringing the two processes together in a centrally managed application, Aircel can handle a greater volume of more complex services with increased consistency, accuracy and efficiency.

Developing a rapid offer design and order delivery environment is essential to meeting customer demands — and will only continue to gain focus and grow in complexity. Bolting on code to front- and back-office systems is not the right approach to providing cost-effective and efficient processes going forward.

What are your plans for developing a rapid offer design and order delivery environment and what challenges do you face? I welcome your thoughts below.

Brian Kracik is director of product marketing for Oracle Communications.