It is an irony of the internet age that its biggest enabler, the telecommunications industry, is often perceived as being dormant as those around it have disrupted, innovated and reinvented themselves.
To be fair, few industries have escaped ridicule when evaluating the merits of their internet strategies. Consider the much maligned print media industry which has had its fair share of criticism over the years, but only because the web so dramatically levelled the playing field for every armchair wannabe journalist. Or the financial services industry, where the most innovative ideas have come not from bellwether financial institutions, but from new entrants – think PayPal, Mint, and Kiva.
And yet, within both the print media and financial services industries, old world players have made significant progress towards meeting their customer’s ever-evolving expectations. Old world brands who’ve survived the transition from a pure bricks-and-mortar existence to providing services in the Cloud may lack creativity and rarely excite you, but chances are you know how to navigate your favourite online newspaper site to get the scoop on your favourite sports team, and can schedule monthly payments for all your household utilities using internet banking with aplomb.
So when I read on my Twitter feed that eBay was “offloading” Skype – not to a pipes-and-tubes Telco, but a venture capital firm – it got me thinking. Are Telco’s truly content playing plumber to the Googles of this world?
Here are five things that should start to change, as Telco’s work hard to earn online cred with customers -
- Transition focus from “dotcom” to “platform” – It matters not how many websites we build and maintain, it’s platforms that deliver a complete customer experience across channels (think Google Applications and iTunes), and provide opportunities to monetize in spades.
- Build a strong social media competence within the enterprise – Social media is being recognised as less of a fad, and more as a way of interacting, collaborating and building communities, not just with customers, but also within an organisation.
- Offer real-time experiences – The immediacy afforded by the internet has meant that businesses can anticipate and respond to customer needs like never before. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are not websites, but platforms that allow businesses to tap the stream of conversations across social connections for targeted offers, incentives and myriad value-adding services.
- Develop new customer personas around unique experiences – Existing market segmentation strategies quite often take a myopic view of customer circumstances and preferences. Today’s customers are evolving, and existing segmentation profiles are becoming less valid.
- Pursue disruptive innovation – Services like Google Voice will significantly impact how traditional Telco’s market their products and services. Telco’s will start to revaluate what their cost and revenue drivers are, and challenge existing theory on how they provide value to customers.
The future is anything but bleak for Telco’s. In fact, now is the time to leverage the gains across other industries – to learn from their foibles and glean insights from their successes.
Finally, apropos of nothing, I should mention that as I type, I’ve been listening to an Italian song by the group Taramancino called “I Giorni Migliori”. A Google translation reveals it roughly means “Best Days”. It’s a song I first heard on an internet radio station, and subsequently bought via Apple’s iTunes store. I did all this on my iPhone. It’s one helluva platform – really.
