Telcos need to pay attention and quickly adapt to a number of megatrends that are interconnected and driving almost all facets of society. These global trends are changing the way utilities, manufacturers, retailers, insurance companies and logistics firms do business, so if service providers don't keep up they will quickly lose out.
In the opening keynote at the OSS/BSS Asia Pacific Summit in Singapore last month, Manoj Menon, partner and MD for Asia Pacific at Frost & Sullivan, outlined eight megatrends such as urbanization, smart infrastructure, preventive healthcare, pay as you go, electric mobility and "beyond the BRICs" that will vastly change the way companies conduct business and governments deliver public services over the next decade.
Because the trends are global, he said, they offer organizations hugely scalable opportunities. They are also interconnected, which suggests synergistic opportunities between them.
Manoj gave the example of tire manufacturers soon being able to move to a pay-as-you-go model (or pay per mile) as they monitor and collect details of usage and advise users in real time of the optimal pressure and speed for the best fuel efficiency.
Of 13 key trends he said will have huge implications for telcos, four stood out as notable. First, he predicts the world of TV is going to change forever as it gets social and viral and TV becomes an app. Second, the fixed broadband market will continue to grow in Asia Pacific despite the heavy penetration of 3G/LTE (expanding from 466 million last year to 1.25 billion by 2016).
Third, big data together with analytics will reach the chasm this year, with M2M data expected to exceed social media in just five years. And finally, the span of influence is increasing rapidly. As an example of this, he said it took radio 38 years to reach an audience of 50 million, TV took 13 years and Facebook took just two years.
Catch-up time
Ongki Kurniawan, XL Axiata's director and chief service management officer, shared the company's long road to improving the customer experience, which he admitted required "a lot of catching up". At one point it was receiving 120,000 complaints a week.
In a market with $3-4 ARPU, Kurniawan said XL decided it was no longer going to play the low-price game and would shift its focus to keeping customers happy and reducing churn.
But its first attempt to improve customer service "failed miserably". "We set up a customer service unit to drive a change in mindset and processes, but it was hard for people to see the benefit, so we ended up going back to our comfort zone and competed on price."