Reflecting recently on my own career in telecommunications, I now marvel at what now goes into the many telco mobile apps now available to consumers and recall that these were the successor to what we once knew as “web self-service”.
Early in my career, I had the product marketing responsibility for the self-service portion of a major vendor’s self-service web product within their BSS offering. Back then, everything was about the bill, or more accurately, trying to get this web self-service thing to handle the consumer billing enquiries that were jamming the telco contact center.
Web self-service certainly had its day, helping to divert calls away from the contact center and getting consumers to engage with providers in an internet space. This model was then superseded by the telco self-service mobile app to handle support and service. But, the siloed nature of the BSS systems meant that many CSPs ended up offering a number of self-service apps for each product line, thus mirroring the silos that they so wanted to cover up. Not surprisingly, consumers became confused as to what to use and CSPs ended up juggling the management and maintenance of a number of self-service applications in app stores. And most importantly, many of these apps were never utilized by customers to the extent hoped.
LotusFlare is now seeing momentum toward creating Self-Service Super Apps – one app representing the service and support functions for all consumer product lines. From what we hear from CSPs, they’ve spent too much time and resources on maintaining apps that very few people use.
LotusFlare’s direct experience in delivering a Self-Service Super App outcome is embodied in our work with Globe. Globe decided it was time to transform the mobile experience platform to dramatically improve performance and accelerate the shift in sales from retail to digital channels. LotusFlare was chosen by Globe due to its track record in delivering customer experience platform solutions and expertise in advanced mobile application design and development.
You can read the customer story here. After a year of live implementation, the New GlobeOne Super App allowed them to decommission three other older apps and took installation, monthly average use and net promoter score of the new app to levels never seen before by Globe for a mobile self-service.
In LotusFlare’s view, the time for super apps has come to telcos so they can stop juggling too many low-usage apps and consolidate to a single app that covers all business lines and provides a rewarding experience.
Stephen Krajewski
Senior Director of Marketing
LotusFlare
