'Customer-Centricity': More Buzzy than 'IMS'?

Billing & OSS World, Washington D.C. — Remember when we were all a-gog about IMS? We just couldn’t get enough. Sure, you might scoff now, telling everyone that you were always too cool to get giddy over the architecture buzzword, but you know you were into it, bandying it about willy-nilly like everyone else on the telecom planet.
 
Well, we’re not really talking about IMS anymore, although of course it’s still there and important. But IP transformation is IP transformation, and that kind of covers things. No, friends, the new buzzword is “customer-centricity.” And it rivals any level of giddiness that IMS ever had.

And it can apply to so, so much. It can mean using policy for knowing how your subscribers are interacting with the network. It could pop up when discussing the ability to roll out customized upsell-offers based on usage profiles. Self-activation, on-device, a la 3G on the iPad, is another example. TELUS’ CTO, during his keynote, stressed that he really wants to enable the customer to, well, cry out like a coddled child for whatever he or she wants at that very moment and actually get it. And that, in whatever form it takes, is the future of the carrier value prop. That means embracing over the top. It means blurring the lines between wireless and wireline. It means opening up network functions to developers. It means putting systems in place that can handle real-time visibility to all aspects of operations, end-to-end. It means, in short, a lot of headaches.

The problem is that want and reality are two different things. Most service providers are so unwieldy and bloated with legacy-everything that getting on a diet of strict customer-centricity might be tough to stick to. It’s an evolutionary process, but it has to happen sooner than the Darwinistic pace we’ve seen in transformations before, because innovation is happening more quickly than ever before. And carriers are a little preoccupied with the classic carrier things, too, like upgrading networks and improving operational efficiencies.

Will service providers drop everything in the rush toward customer-centricity? Likely not, just as no one deployed full end-to-end IMS right away. But should they? Maybe. Because taking the new attitude of enabling multiplicity  – a multiplicity of customer approaches, billing mechanisms, bundled offers, what have you, in order to serve an exponentially diverse (and let’s face it, whiny) customer base – is the only salvation as users continue to evolve loyalty away from network providers and toward whoever provides the apps or devices that they happen to rely on.