Three Ways Mobile Operators Can Support Enterprises in a Digital-First World

The world of digital communication offers exciting new revenue opportunities within the enterprise sector for mobile operators willing to expand their portfolio. The need to keep up with the mobile-first, channel-hopping, 24/7 consumer is putting enterprise communications infrastructure under pressure. Creating a clear market need for operators with the right offering.

Omnichannel is here to stay – modern consumers are used to keeping in touch with family and friends using their favorite messaging apps and channels. When they extend the dialogue to businesses and brands, they don’t want to leave those familiar, convenient patterns.

This is why enterprises need to integrate customer messaging, from text messages to email, push, voice and chat apps, into a single view and space. They need to make it simple, pleasant and convenient for customers to interact with them. After all, if companies don’t maintain a seamless dialogue with the customer throughout their lifecycle, they risk losing them to a competitor.

Constant interaction is key: which opens up opportunities for forward-thinking mobile operators that can help them achieve omnichannel communications: or, to simplify, seamlessly integrate all their communications channels.

We’re talking about a 360-degree telecoms connectivity, together with the platform to support it – any operator with the ability to provide this can use it to build on their brand power, infrastructure and footprint to create enduring, profitable partnerships with enterprises and remain relevant in the digital world.

Infobip has created the Enterprise Partnership model specifically to help operators build an omnichannel offering for the enterprise. Available as a white label solution, the Infobip omnichannel platform is already helping mobile operators build a service offering without major investment and expenditure.

In this blog, we share our experience of three key revenue opportunities that Infobip’s Enterprise Partnership model is providing for mobile operators.

With 1.67 trillion A2P SMS messages sent worldwide in 2017 and volumes set to rise to 2.8 trillion in 2022, according to Mobilesquared, A2P is an important part of business strategy for mobile operators. However, user habits and preferences have been changing much more rapidly than operators’ business models. As a result, operators were often viewed by enterprise customers as a delivery mechanism, with little else to offer in terms of solving their customer communication challenges.

As leading operators are aware of this issue, they have been finding the solution in positioning themselves as an ICT and integration provider, with portfolios designed to meet the needs of enterprise clients.

Operators positioning themselves as omnichannel communications experts, providing a wide range of channels on a single platform, enable enterprises to design customer journeys that deliver the right message at the right time over the most appropriate channel.

Enterprises can achieve seamless customer dialogue with the support of the mobile operator, who remains behind the scenes and invisible to the consumer. At the same time, they can create innovative new use cases for A2P SMS to enhance the customer experience and consolidate their relationship with the customer, creating a virtuous circle that benefits both the operator and the enterprise.

Consumers increasingly expect to engage with their favorite brands using their favorite messaging apps. Enterprises cannot afford to ignore this expectation, but integrating these apps with their existing channels presents yet another technology challenge.

Partnerships between operators and aggregators are critical to enable operators to tap into this revenue stream, allowing them to benefit from the tools, APIs, market insight and enterprise experience of companies like Infobip.

By incorporating Viber and other chat apps into its platform, operators can create new revenue channels using A2P SMS or voice traffic for 2-factor authentication, or as a fall back in case data connectivity is not available to deliver an OTT message.

Imagine a scenario where a home insurance provider handles an insurance claim using a chat app with rich media capabilities to share photographs while offering to provide instant support to a distressed home owner. Crucial information and alerts, such as the visit of a repair engineer are handled by SMS, and the claim summary is shared as a pdf via email, all fully integrated with back-end systems and CRM.

Working with Infobip, operators can help their enterprise customers to make this vision a reality, offering the capability to create personalized, branded, media rich, interactive mobile experiences, alongside SMS, and voice services – again, through a single platform.

In an age where accommodation, rides, and many other services are ordered over mobile apps and platforms, the consumer’s mobile phone number is increasingly tied to the access and consumption of these services.

However, sharing personal information like a phone number creates a real security risk for several reasons.

Companies need to protect both buyer and seller identities by providing the assurance that their number will remain private and secure. With this, they will also reduce chances of transactions and arrangements happening between parties directly, which can result in revenue loss, fraud, and compromised personal safety of platform users.

Call anonymization, also known as number masking, is an example of a useful service that digital platforms are adopting in light of these concerns. This service is based around a voice number the platform employs to bridge calls between users.

In other words, a driver and a rider can call each other for meetup details or bags and possessions left behind in the car, but numbers displayed on their phone screens will not be their personal numbers. Rather, it will be a number that the platform in question obtained through call anonymization providers like Infobip.

To take another example, an e-commerce provider can use call anonymization to improve customer experience. By enabling the consumer and courier to establish a phone call over an “anonymous” number, the two parties can agree a convenient delivery time between themselves, making sure the consumer is home to receive the parcel and avoiding long waits in customer service queues.

There is a real opportunity for operators to leverage their core competencies and brand power to deepen their relationships with enterprise customers and tighten their foothold in the market. By choosing an expert partner like Infobip, operators can clear the first hurdle in creating a digital service proposition for the enterprise.

The Infobip Platform provides operators with an entire omnichannel business proposition as a while label solution, together with a global sales force dedicated to onboarding new enterprise clients. It is already helping several mobile operators, including the Tele2 Group and T-Mobile Croatia, demonstrate their ability as digital service providers.

There is growing market demand for innovative approaches that help companies both to understand the customer journey and build an omnichannel strategy around their customer needs. The really exciting thing is that omnichannel builds on operators’ core capabilities and assets to demonstrate their continued relevance in a digital economy, driving revenue growth and facing the future with confidence.

By: Renata Stefic, Director of Telecom Solutions at Infobip