5 Essential Capabilities for Delivering Superior Partner Experiences
In the highly competitive telecommunications industry, communication service providers (CSPs) must deliver exceptional experiences to satisfy and retain customers. As CSPs expand their enterprise portfolio and form new partnerships, the partner experience becomes equally important. This means CSPs must make it easy for partners to work with them if they want to succeed as digital service providers. To do this, CSPs need to evolve their business support systems (BSS) , partner management and integration capabilities to be scalable and flexible.
Meeting Partner Expectations
Partners want to combine CSP products, networks and IT assets with their own offerings to create attractive revenue-generating products and offers. Like end users (consumers), enterprise partners demand quick, easy interactions with CSPs. New partners want the ability to onboard themselves, sell and market their products, manage their agreements, view their statements and invoices, and perform settlements—all online and without delay.
Hyperscalers such as Amazon, Meta, and Google make it easy to partner with them. AWS’ mission is “to accelerate [partners’] engagement with Amazon Web Services (AWS) by making it easier than ever to work with us.” Joining the AWS Partner Network is a simple matter of completing three online forms and enrolling in a partner path (e.g., hardware, software, services) that facilitates navigation to relevant resources and programs.
CSPs must deliver superior partner experiences across the digital partner lifecycle, from joining the ecosystem, filling orders and creating offers with CSPs and other partners. If they can’t onboard, create, curate, monetize and market their services as easily as leading cloud platforms, potential partners may not deem a CSP ecosystem worth the investment, no matter the brand.
Automation is Essential for Outstanding Partner Experiences
The manual systems and processes traditionally used to onboard and market new products and services are too time- and labor-intensive to support the establishment and management of multiple, diverse enterprise partnerships. Instead, CSPs need to adopt zero-touch (automated) partnering. The entire service lifecycle should be automated from partner and product onboarding to fulfillment, orchestration, management, assurance and billing.
5 Capabilities CSPs Need to Deliver Superior Partner Experiences
To make their partner experiences stand out, CSPs need a platform that offers end-to-end capabilities.