We're on the ground in Nice for TM Forum Live! this week, which kicked off Tuesday with the first round of keynote presentations. We heard from TM Forum Chairman Keith Willetts, JP Rangaswami, the chief scientist at Salesforce, David Moffatt, previous CFO of Telstra Corp and Phil Jordan, group CIO at Telefonica. The two major trends that stood out from the on-stage discussions were the importance of customer centricity and the need to accelerate the pace of innovation by further aligning service providers' product evolutions with industry trends.
As JP described, companies have many new ways to understand customer needs. Phil went on to state that IT previously managed back office systems, and is now becoming an enabler for the business. Future industry leaders will be ones that understand how to best leverage customer and subscriber data. David also insisted upon the fact that service providers should aim to delight their customers and make them feel important by prioritizing them instead of only focusing on cost-containment programs.
This is a major shift in how service providers see their customers, the result of an evolution from accepting churn to proactively combating it. It has required a balancing act between changing company culture, to focusing on customers and continuing to protect margins. In the service assurance and optimization domains, this means offering innovative service quality visualization solutions, proactively preventing service outage and degradations and accelerating service/product roll-outs by embracing the latest network virtualization innovations, such as NFV. Simultaneously, though, network costs must be streamlined through improved planning and optimization processes.
Making sense of customer data is another key focal point in Nice this week, as CSPs of all shapes and sizes aim to transform the “fire hose” of data about their customers, service and network intelligence, into actionable insights that improves the customer experience. This is an area where we've focused much of our attention. You can read more about these capabilities in a recent video with my colleague Andre Sequerah.
For live updates from Nice throughout the rest of the week, be sure to follow us on Twitter at @Infovista. If you're on-site, visit booth #10 to learn more about how we're helping CSPs and mobile operators better monitor network performance and network optimization to improve the customer experience for their subscribers.
