Operators worldwide are scrambling to support consumerization of IT as they show a universal concern of increasing customer satisfaction for enterprises and SMBs (small- and medium-size businesses), according to a survey by Heavy Reading.
The study that covered 56 communications service providers (CSPs) across the globe shows that operators are aware of the demand for offerings like bring your own device (BYOD). Now they must make sure their own systems and IT departments are able to provide and support such services.
According to the survey, CSPs are definitely concentrating on the needs of the business customer as they would like to be able to offer services that enable threshold alerts, customer-set spending and rich customer care options and loyalty plans.
Respondents also indicate that they would like to be able to improve their business customer satisfaction by being able to have a single view of the customer. Despite these desires and others, CSPs find that complex activities such as resource optimization, service qualification and design and discovery prevent them from having optimal service fulfillment and less than desirable fallout rate.
Further, CSPs feel that other factors such as lack of BSS/OSS convergence also inhibits them from better serving their business customers.
On top of their own operational issues, operators are also dealing with the demands of the business customers themselves. With the demand for the consumerization of IT, CSPs are being asked to provide capabilities such as separate price plans for employees’ personal use and business use and to disable certain services when a user switches from business to personal mode. And, demand of such capabilities keep increasing as the appeal of BYOD is that of cost savings.
Depending on their own BYOD policies, businesses may be thinking that they don’t even have to purchase or support their employees’ device, saving them money per employee. At the same time, businesses realize that BYOD does not translate to bring your own support for the device, so the burden of supporting the vast array of devices will fall on corporate IT, and the business customers will be looking for solutions from CSPs as a result.