Business Process Outsourcing: An Effective Accelerator in Time-to-Market

By Al Brisard

Accelerating the time it takes to bring new products to market is a goal shared by most telecommunications carriers today. Introducing high-quality new products or services earlier than their competitors can enable carriers to increase the loyalty of current customers and add new customers, often drawn from the ranks of other carriers. The caveat, of course, is introducing high quality new products.

First to market often doesn’t guarantee success, rapid growth and an enhanced reputation. The products also need to be well designed, developed and tested. Often new back-office processes such as billing and collections, commissions and fees, support processes such as network inventory maintenance and provisioning services need to be put in place. Front-office processes to include new ways to take orders, bill and collect payments will also need to be modified or replaced – all this while ensuring that the new product does what the carrier says it does.

Particularly now, as the economy is heating up and more customers are adding new services to improve their businesses, business process outsourcing (BPO) can be an effective way for carriers to get their new products more quickly into the hands of existing and new customers. Hiring BPO companies enables carriers to outsource the development of new day-to-day back and front office business processing services, freeing up internal resources to focus on and streamline the development of reliable new products. In addition, most BPO companies offer their services on a fee-for-service basis, transforming fixed costs into variable costs. This eliminates the need for a carrier to further invest in large capital expenditures and administrative headcount that would have to be amortized over a period of years, and frees the carrier up to allocate additional funding to its new endeavors. 

While BPO can be instrumental to a carrier’s ability to bring new products and services more quickly to market, the choice of a BPO company must be made carefully. First and foremost, the carrier needs to ensure that the company has the depth and breadth of experience working with carrier clients. It must also have end-to-end back- and front-office experience providing services particular to the carrier industry. Order management, migrations (billings, network, customer and data), process creation and optimization are a few of the processes that a BPO company must be well-versed in.

The BPO company must be flexible enough to take on as much or (perhaps more important) as little of the carrier’s business as is actually required. The company must have a proven track record of meeting or exceeding delivery dates, adhering to contractual obligations and handling requirement changes. 

Business-process outsourcing companies can provide many advantages to a carrier looking to accelerate time-to-market for new products and services. Particularly in the area of implementing new back- and front-office processes, these companies can help reduce administrative headcount, fixed costs and capital expenditures. By leveraging a trusted and reliable BPO company, a carrier can blend internal and external resources to meet the needs of the business in a timely and efficient fashion.

Al Brisard is vice president of marketing and business development at Vertek Corp. , a leading provider of end-to-end business process outsourcing, business consulting and managed business assurance offerings that allow communication providers to reduce costs, improve customer experiences, grow revenue and ultimately improve profitability. Contact him at abrisard@vertek.com.