Top 8 innovations for African Telecom operators to remain relevant by 2020

The world is becoming a global village and the set of rules which made business boom in past have seriously evolved and possibly might not work well in this technology era. We have seen how a company like Whatsapp, held the world spell bound with just 55 staffs serving about 450 million users which is approximately 5% of the world population and almost equal to the entire GSM population in Africa in four years and also, Whatsapp even sold to Facebook for a whooping $19 billion dollars. It is clearly hard to know how many Telecom companies in Africa with their thousands of staff are worth $19 billion dollars.

Even the celebrated Africa’s richest Man with all his conglomerate of industries, decades of building and running chains of businesses with thousands of employees accompanied with all the political will, was yet to achieve a $19billion dollar net worth as of 2012.

This shows the power of OTT and it is a bit unclear how much economic impact the OTTs have had over Africa in the past few years.

Seeing that the African telecom industry provides millions of direct and indirect employments, there is need for African telecom companies to carve a niche for themselves in order to remain sustainable, because the fact remains that nothing can be done to stop the tech-revolution already impacting the world.

Based on my studies and research on Telecom companies and Customers in Nigeria, I have come up with top ten critical areas in which telecom Companies can re-innovate.

SIM Swap/Replacement Process

This activity happens to be a heartbeat in Africa’s Telecom industry, since there is hardly any diversification into Telecom APIs, it simply implies that no active SIM cards, no revenue inflow for African Telecom industries.

This happens to be most frequent customer request at for Telecom companies in Nigeria

According customers report, the general process is presently very slow and time wasting, causing customers so much pains and stress. Some Telecoms companies claim to offer online SIM swap services but unfortunately the processes are unnecessarily long and tiring.

Innovation: SIM Swap in 2mins in 3 steps using automated teller machine or through the use of better integrated and automated CRM tools

This might not completely require physical customer service agent as User Verification/Authentication can be achieved through the use of fingerprint and face recognition technologies which are not far-fetched and are not expensive to implement.

This will help make the process faster and ensure better customer experience and steady revenue flow.

These will also allow Customer agents have more time to focus on providing better customer service in other relevant areas thereby causing increased efficiency.

SIM Registration Processes and Technologies

SIM Registration happens to be another livewire for MNOs (Mobile Network Operators) in Africa as it plays a major role in subscriber acquisition and increased revenue for MNOs and fortunately, it has never been downplayed on. However, the processes and technologies employed have not shown much concern for the future and customer experience.

On several occasions during SIM registration processes, Foreigners and Nigerians in Diaspora have popped questions like “why do you need my fingerprint?” or “Why should I give you my fingerprint”. The reason is one’s fingerprint is very sensitive Biometric information and people are not completely sure of security of information on the MNOs side. Another reason is that, from where they come from, there is hardly any fingerprint request whenever SIM cards are purchased.

The argument will be that it is in line with Government regulations and processes for security sake, but the question is to what practical level has this information requested helped the security?

Is this biometric information easily accessible and available to relevant Security Agencies?

One will wonder if this information are essentially processed and structured such that they can be retrieved and reused to improving customer service delivery services.

If the MNOs claim they are, then why can’t previous subscribers interested in getting additional SIM cards not walk into a customer centre and have new SIM cards added using previously register subscriber data instead of going through the stressful hassle of registering the SIM card afresh.

These SIM registration processes and technologies need to be improved to increase and help the rate of customer acquisition to keep revenue strong.

Product Development

Most times it is very obvious to see that some Telecom Products and services are designed without extensive involvement of sample customers and even customer agents.

Most times customers have noticed some disconnections between the product team and customer service agents especially after launch of new products which already been announced on the media.

Most times these have cause some great and innovative products to die natural deaths, not because they were not good enough but because the Customer agents who are meant to defend, educate customers and provide useful feedbacks were not carried along.

If African Telecom product teams could adopt tested UX design processes employed by Tech giants, then Telecom products and service will become innovatively appealing and will also sell more and result to increased revenue and higher customer acquisition and retention.

Transparency in Billing and Tariffs

There is a perception common in Nigeria, that there is hardly any free meal from Telecom companies as it is now an open secret that many GSM subscribers often complain of unsolicited charges coming from various SMS VAS contents which they claim they hardly subscribe for.

The fact is Telecoms especially in Nigeria need to embark on campaigns to regain customers’ unwavered trust and confidence, because it is obvious that customers are boxed up in the Telecom situation because of one perception which was exactly stated in the same xanaxcost.com words by 2 different GSM subscribers: “they are all the same”, they believe they lack better options. This implies that once there arises a ‘perceived’ better option, there might be major customer base shifts.

It might be helpful for Telecom companies to run customer re-assurance campaigns that might involve providing infrastructure integrated telecom/mobile Apps that help customers with periodic CDR statements clearly detailing how subscriber airtime is expended.

Infrastructure /Technology

The telecom infrastructures in Africa are worth several billions of dollars, therefore the Infrastructure needs to be optimized and maximized.

One major reason is that Software tools functions that are not well integrated, UI not modern and not easy to use, Adoption of NFV (Network Function Visualization, SDN (Software Defined Networking), WebRTC, development of our own Telecom APIs, Datafication of voice

Nowadays, there are cheap software implementations that simulate some of the telecom hardware which could be used to upgrade 2G to 4G networks, which could also be used to propagate telecom networks to rural areas with very little cost, minimal equipment, lower power requirement and little or no special land requirements.

These solutions can cause great reduction in operational/maintenance cost in increase in efficiency and easy deployment of Telecom Applications.

Other implications of adoption of modern telecom technologies and solutions are increased revenue, Creation of better medium for development of modern products and services, ability to take advantage of the market in rest of the world with our products and services, decongestion of load on infrastructure owing to conventional voice services, help the various departments of telecom companies easily and effectively meet their financial targets.

Customer Contact Center

Customers are the reasons why businesses are still running and it is very important to be available to offer support and guide on provided products and services.

There is also need to be able to structurally integrate customer data in order to take advantage of Contextual communications which involves bring together the right information at the right time with the right group by the integration of external data sources like CRM, ERP, web cookies etc

This could help telecom companies address customers individually acknowledging their peculiarities.

Presently so much hard-to-integrate hardware is the order of the day and they are also expensive. Adoption of modern customer service solution will help reduce running cost, increase speed and efficiency of service delivery and enhance customer experience.

Research, Development and Innovation

As it is commonly seen in this part of the world, there is little attention in the area of research and development therefore disruptive innovation is hard to find. This area plays a lot of role in the future and ground-breaking success of technology businesses

This is need for Innovations through Cloud technology, IoT, WebRTC, Telecom APIs, and Virtualized Telecom Infrastructures. These areas hold so many prospects for Telecoms in Africa as the world has become innovation driven.

Acquisition/Support of Startups, Reverse Mentorship, Sponsor of Hackathons

There are always common tendencies of bigger companies being faced with strong possible competitors/threats from upcoming startups with great products, this made companies like Apple to acquire Beats by Dre, Google to acquire Android, Microsoft to acquire Skype, Facebook to acquire Whatsapp and so on. The fact remains that no company no matter how big and strong has it all therefore there is need to leverage other solutions and ideas in order to remain relevant.

This is one area we find ourselves lacking in Africa; companies rarely tap into the pool of talents with unconventional ideas and solutions backed up with originality.

There also need to bring young unconventional people into the picture, because they can help the companies with unconventional and product ideas while they are been trained in the companies this is called reverse mentorship.

One of the ways these can be helped through the organization of productive hackathons where companies can learn from the younger generations who are developers in order to work with them in building solutions that could help the economy. This will help Telecom Companies to be better positioned and also prepared the future and the oncoming technology revolution soon to hit Africa.

CONCLUSION

Ideas are priceless. Innovation is the key to any big company that wants to remain relevant few years from now because latest technologies will cause so much competition in most businesses as people will be able to have easy access to solutions that previously requires company expertise. There is indeed a great call from Africa Telecom industries and other industries to setup innovation teams to spear head relevant internal campaigns to help boost companies’ innovation and revenues. The team will periodically investigate company products and services, customer processes and company operational processes in order suggest innovative ways to improve them through disruptive/innovative technologies. This will not help African businesses to be more sustainable in the coming years but also it will make African have access to cost-effective and exception products and services.

Author: David Alozie

ABOUT AUTHOR

David Alozie is an innovative entrepreneur with interest in Disruptive Technologies for Development (IoT, WebRTC, Big Data, 3D printing) as relates to Africa. He also has knowledge on IoT, Bitcoin, BlockChain, Modern Telecoms, Web, mobile app development and WEBRTC technology. He is rated to be among the top executives in the IT and Software industry by the Nigerian IT and Software publication ratings 2015. Being among the first subject matter expert on WebRTC, IoT, Telecom and Telecom API, his focus is to spearhead activities that will increase and propagate the use of WebRTC Technology in Africa for the purpose of development and also to make life easier for people. He also possesses experience in the telecommunication market Industry.