Orga Systems CEO Wolfgang Kroh shares his thoughts with group editor Joseph Waring on everything from CEM and self-service to big data and flexibility
CEM
"As mobile penetration went beyond 100%, everybody was saying the ultimate end goal is the customer, which of course is the hot topic that is really playing out now. Over a short period of time, telcos went from a service centric to a product centric to a customer centric model. So now everybody is saying you need to have a transformation project, real CRM, a product catalog and a service catalog, and charging should be convergent and real time even for postpaid.
"This focus [on the customer experience] raises the question of what do we know about our customers, which has led to the big data explosion with telcos seeking more intelligence about their customers.
"Now people are asking, do we really need to manage an IT infrastructure? Here we are in the cloud with software as a service or infrastructure as a service or what people might call as platform as a service."
Never change a running system
"There's a lot of pressure on flexibility. The marketing and sales guys are really pushing hard. To be honest, they tend to overdo it on the requirements. On the one hand, you need to translate requirements to what revenue and profit offering the service will generate. I'm seeing a lot of competitive scenarios where in the end they [vendors and operators] are going to kill themselves because they'll offer services that will never be used by anyone because they're overtaken by something else."