Specialized cloud infrastructure is a CSP’s best friend

Communication service providers (CSPs) know that keeping pace with changing technology is not just a trend to improve internal efficiency or cut costs; it is foundational to their most basic value proposition. CSPs have risen to the occasion, and the industry's transformation of its networking infrastructure over the past ten years has been nothing short of extraordinary. 

CSPs have invested in, deployed and marketed a wide range of new transmission mediums and software-defined networks that a customer can self-manage, all while facing increased competition from long-time peers and market disruptors. They now have the foundations for incredible growth, driven partly by enterprises' growing demand for connectivity and the opportunity to sell add-on services to these connectivity solutions, which is unlocked by having great connectivity services and a powerful tech stack. 

If CSPs are to capture the opportunity, though, they must embark on a new era of transformation. This time, it will focus on improving internal operations rather than the services CSPs provide customers. As is often the case, the first step will be to mature their tech stacks.

Customer Satisfaction Through Specialization
Though CSPs have been at the forefront of the connectivity revolution, many have yet to embark on the internal transformation they will need to compete on the enterprise stage. As uniquely complex, interconnected enterprises, CSPs face various challenges other sectors do not when it comes to bringing their services to market. 

Not only do today's CSPs offer a diverse range of transmission options, but they also serve customer bases that are just as complex, often spanning multiple regions across the globe. Furthermore, they must balance serviceability and maintain compliance across these geographies, all while keeping services online and working with large networks of partners. In short, CSPs utilize different data sets than organizations in other sectors, and they need these datasets to integrate and interact in unique ways to automate and optimize back-end processes successfully. 

As if building a tech stack to accommodate these factors wasn't challenging enough, many of the above nuances rarely stay behind the scenes. Each has the potential to ripple out and affect the customer journey in significant, often unexpected ways. In a saturated market like telecoms, CSPs cannot afford that. 

Nowadays, effortless experiences are any organization's primary differentiator. It's the most important advantage a CSP can have over its competition. As such, CSPs need to begin viewing every technological investment through the lens of CX rather than their operations. The question shouldn't be how technology will boost revenue but how it will improve customers' lives. The answer is specialization, and it must happen at every level.

Generic tools may have sufficed in the past, but as complexity grows, investing in specialized, end-to-end software ensures that backend tools enhance internal efficiency and support agile, responsive services in a market that demands innovation and flexibility. By leveraging industry-specific technologies, CSPs can better manage their intricate business models, support legacy systems and improve customer experiences.

Brick by Brick
Updating a tech stack to support enterprise-level sales is a long-term project with many moving parts, and CSPs often don't know where to begin. One place to consider is the configure, price, quote (CPQ) solution they use to manage contract terms. Specialization is absolutely critical in this area, and 85% of CSP leaders say their current platforms fall short in this area.

At their most basic level, CPQ solutions act as a bridge between front- and back-office operations to ensure accuracy, shorten cycles and accelerate the quote-to-cash process. They're a foundational element of the modern sales stack, helping organizations refine and optimize contract proposals and terms using automation. The structured orders created by CPQs provide downstream accuracy and efficiency benefits in order management, inventory and billing. As a result, teams that use CPQs tend to see seller workloads drop, contract terms standardize, better cross- and upselling results and higher customer satisfaction. 

Enticed by these perks, CSPs embraced CPQ shortly after the solution's introduction to the market, and they enjoyed some improvements to sales cycles for some time. However, as the market changed and operations grew more complex, generic CPQs proved increasingly ill-suited to supporting CSPs, especially those banking on complex enterprise contracts to drive growth. Generic CPQs take a generic approach to modelling products, not considering all the relationships and dependencies in the services or the contracts. It's fundamentally incompatible with CSPs' business model for enterprise sales. 

Each enterprise customer is unique, so products need to support rich service configurability, flexible pricing and bespoke contracts. To be successful in doing so, all dependencies and rules must be managed by appropriate guard rails that ensure customer and sales teams can fulfil what they quote. Without these guardrails, programs that rely on generic CPQs either become more superficial in the support they provide as the CSP's complexity grows or require a lot of expensive hard coding and integration to keep up. CSPs remain heavily siloed, which exacerbates this issue. When disparate databases are inaccessible across departments, CSPs face qualification issues, catalog discrepancies, inaccurate analytics and challenges managing deals for multi-region operations. 

Perhaps the biggest hindrance to CSPs is that generic CPQs' relatively inflexible processes limit their ability to rely on automation to get the job done. The way these systems are designed leaves little room for dynamic pricing, case-based discounts, service bundling and other complex billing scenarios. Not only does this restrict potential productivity boosts by demanding more manual intervention, but it disrupts customer journeys and renders self-service systems relatively ineffective. 

For CSPs looking to thrive in the competitive enterprise market, investing in modern, telco-specific CPQ solutions is no longer optional; it's essential for operational efficiency, customer satisfaction and long-term success. These platforms are built to remedy the key shortcomings of generic software, promoting:

• Agility. Purpose-built CPQs offer rapid service configuration, cloud-based architecture and robust API-first designs to mitigate downtime during deployment and updates. This is incredibly important for CSPs as connectivity is mission-critical for customers; outages, downtime and other disruptions can have massive CX consequences.  
• Dexterity. Contract complexity is rising fast in enterprise CSP sales. Organizations need to model and balance intricate scenarios, like usage-based billing, subscription plans and real-time pricing, with ease and communicate about these services to customers seamlessly. Specialized CPQs can help them manage the price and service commitments made in contracts and handle complicated and rapidly evolving tasks, like partner settlements, real-time billing, discounting and other advanced monetization features.
• Integration. In other sectors, the data sellers need to define contract terms is available within the department's tech stack. That's rarely the case in CSPs, as ongoing network performance, footprint, and other critical information may not be readily available to sales management systems. CPQs built for CSPs emphasize the importance of integration, with extra attention given to seamless, real-time communication between customer relationship management, billing, order management, network inventory and other critical software to ensure accuracy and feasibility.

These features improve backend operations and customer touchpoints, enabling truly automated workflows and minimizing the need for seller intervention. They give employees time back to focus on more meaningful work, like building loyalty and strengthening customer relationships. At the same time, they make self-service options (and recommendations) a reality, so customers who wish to work through the process on their own can move forward as well. 

The Work Ahead
Though investing in an updated, telecom-specific CPQ solution won't fix every CX challenge enterprise CSPs face, it provides a foundation for future work. Telecom-specific CPQs allow organizations to streamline their sales processes, enhance pricing accuracy, expand with value-added services, and reduce time to market, all of which are critical in a fast-paced enterprise environment. By modernizing the sales cycle first, CSPs can set the stage for durable revenue growth, which is a stable foundation throughout the rest of the transformation journey.

This adoption and innovation pave the way for data-driven decision-making and enable the adoption of advanced analytics, ultimately leading to more informed strategies and better customer experiences. By prioritizing CPQ in their transformation initiatives, CSPs can build the agility and responsiveness needed to thrive in a competitive landscape, positioning themselves for sustained success.