Few industries have had to reinvent themselves as often as telecommunications or telecom IT. While most businesses have been transformed and, in some cases, clobbered (think newspapers) by the rapid arrival of the digital age, telecom has had to reinvent itself on an almost daily basis.
Imagine a restaurant having to change its menu every week or, in some cases, every day. That’s what telecoms have to do, and that is what makes the telecommunications operations landscape so challenging.
HCI Technologies describes it well in its dealings with telecoms: “As we engage with several globally recognized telecom majors, we identified several overarching challenges impacting the sector as a whole. Most CIOs are grappling with tight budgets and lacking a skilled resource pool.”
In short: Things are changing — constantly — and telecoms often have trouble keeping up. But if you take a deep breath, survey the landscape, and embrace it instead of fearing it, the future looks ripe with opportunity.
In this guide, we’ll explore some of the challenges that telecom IT companies currently face and provide solutions to help take your business to the next level.
Overcoming Industry Hurdles
Global telecom IT deployments present numerous challenges for service delivery teams. For example, you may face technical hurdles like outdated or unreliable infrastructure. You might also encounter regulatory obstacles such as licensing requirements and compliance with local laws and operational difficulties such as language barriers and managing remote teams.
Cultural challenges
Putting aside governmental institutions, there are cultural considerations telecom IT companies need to be familiar with. Understanding basic etiquette like removing your shoes if you’re installing an integrated camera system in a mosque in Dubai to realizing that National Heroes Day is the Fourth Monday in August in the Philippines (probably not the best day to do a massive IT upgrade of government buildings) are crucial for your project success.
The world has thousands of local laws, holidays, cultural norms, and political considerations. Expecting one person at your company to know them all is not realistic.
Geopolitical challenges
Whether you’re working in a long-established democracy like France or a country with a shaky central government like Somalia, you’ll need to navigate the warren of local laws that apply. In some cases, the regulations requiring something as seemingly innocuous as setting up a payment processing system are extensive.
In some countries, you’ll have government minders following your techs. In most cases, you’re better off partnering with a company that uses local workers who understand the local political environment.
Language barrier challenges
This is obvious, but it trips up tech companies. You don’t want to send your best tech who speaks Arabic to a land where Farsi is the rule. A few misunderstood words here and there can lead to disaster or, at the very least, a lot of wasted billable hours.
Infrastructure challenges
There can be huge differences in what is available to work with between, say, New Zealand and Macedonia. If existing infrastructure supports platform and project management, there are significant savings in using what’s there. Sometimes, you may have to “bring your own” scalable solutions tailored to the infrastructure on hand.
Partnering with an entity that understands what the local infrastructure offers. In business, time is indistinguishable from money, so you want techs that understand the situation on the ground immediately without on-the-job learning.
Cost challenges
Global deployments are costly, although the costs vary greatly depending on the country, the project, and the scope.
Modernizing Service Delivery for Telecom IT
Addressing the aforementioned challenges requires careful planning, effective communication, and a deep understanding of local market dynamics to ensure a successful deployment.
Leveraging our telecom IT expertise, here are Kinettix’s recommendations for overcoming these hurdles so you can achieve scale and meet your business objectives.
1. Less Is More
The way to keep customers is to make their digital experience as seamless as possible. Build a seamless blend of telecom experiences from mobile to home to Internet of Things (IoT) and allow a customer to move gracefully between platforms, and you’ll reduce customer churn. Customers don’t want to jump around, so give them a reason to stay put.
2. Invest in Infrastructure
Patching potholes, repaving roads, or building bridges is a no-brainer in the physical world, so it should be a similar no-brainer in the digital world. Yes, there is a cost. But there is perhaps a greater cost is not upgrading at all. The infrastructure needs a top-down reassessment from your data networks to your hardware, to your cloud-based capabilities to your security systems.
If this is beyond the scope of your budget, your company may want to partner with an external entity that can provide the field services you need, tailored to the local landscape.
3. Hyper-Scalability
At every level, you want to have the ability to expand as needed, some innovations may not meet every customer’s needs, but you want to meet every customer's needs. And you can do that by creating custom, scalable solutions.
4. The Right People
The telecom landscape is changing as fast as the movie offerings at the local multiplex. You want people in place who can deliver the latest, more innovative solutions.
We aren’t advocating cleaning house; the experience of existing hands blended with those who are up to date on the latest and greatest is often the best model. Or, at the very least, sending existing employees to seminars and workshops for the latest trends is advised.
5. Innovate
The telecom IT landscape is constantly in flux, and there’s room for anything new that can help customer experience, infrastructure efficiency, and information deliverability.
The telecom landscape is littered with the cyber carcasses of ideas that have flamed out, but for every misfire, there are plenty of success stories too. Failure isn’t failure; it’s trial and error and then success. YOU may just be the next big thing.
Finding the Right Implementation Partner
As you can see, partnering with a global implementation partner is crucial to telecom IT growth. However, companies today are settling for partners that are just ‘good enough.’ And let’s face it, in this fast-paced industry, good enough is no longer good enough.
“Some companies cope with the brutal pace of mobile and technological innovation by cobbling together their solutions piecemeal as a particular need or problem arises,” says telecommunications firm Advantix. “These companies squeak by with ‘good enough’ mobility management, often to the detriment of their employees’ productivity and the size of their mobile telecom bills.”
Your firm needs to take steps to partner with entities that can help elevate customer experience on the back end and on the front end, and worldwide. Here are some questions you should ask while researching different implementation partners to turn “good enough” into “better than.”
Questions of Approach
Not all implementation partners have the same methodology, even if the goals and applications of their software overlap with the rest of the field. Here, you’re looking for their value propositions.
Ask questions like these:
- How can you help us improve our talent pool of field technicians?
- How can you help our field service operations scale to demand and growth?
- To what extent have you been directly involved with project management and coordination (PM/PC) for former clients? And what degree of involvement can you provide us?
- In what ways does your methodology help us improve as a telecom IT provider?
- What benefits and applications does your presence provide?
- How does collaboration with you work, and with what frequency can we expect updates, insights, and assessments from you?
- What is your routine approach to each new deployment?
- What will a partnership with you actually cost us?
- What is your availability for on-the-fly or emergency projects and maintenance?
Questions of Experience
Not only do you want to find an implementation partner who has been in field services long enough to have experienced both common issues and bizarre outliers in the world of telecom IT, but you want a partner who has dealt with projects beyond your organization’s current purview and succeeded.
Draft questions that will reveal whether this potential partner has a beneficial level of expertise for improving your own:
- What countries have you executed projects in, and how recently?
- What is your previous experience with telecom IT deployments of our organization’s scope, scale, and location?
- How familiar are you with routine and advanced IT stewardship?
- What familiarity do you have with problem management on a PM/PC level?
- What experience do you have with organizational change management, specifically enterprise software implementation?
- Has your organization previously helped a midsized or smaller field services operation grow to a higher level of capability and reach?
- Have you previously coordinated clients with international vendors for project execution?
- How have you customized your field service management (FSM) platform offering to other clients in the past?
- Does your organization value transparency, and how do you demonstrate that to clients?
Questions of Growth
The only reason to bring on an entity as a partner is if they help provide or identify avenues for mutual growth. Include specific questions concentrating on the future of your industry and how a strong partnership can help to take advantage of new advancements and weather any seismic changes:
- What are the technologies we should prepare to implement in the next two to five years?
- Where is telecom IT heading on a global scale?
- How can you help us break into new international markets without prohibitive costs?
- What global partners do you have relationships with to help us make inroads into certain regions of the world?
- Based on our organization’s current IT stack, what areas need the most immediate improvements?
- How well or poorly is our current IT infrastructure set up for implementing emerging solutions without experiencing compatibility issues?
- Can you provide us with local insights into new global markets, from economic and legal regulations to cultural intricacies?
Our Approach to Telecom IT
Kinettix is a reliable partner for creating a more robust contingent workforce and expanding your reach to handle global demands. We serve as an extension of your organization, helping you handle a greater workload and accommodate more complex and demanding clients.
Whether you need talent in a remote corner of the world, coordinators to manage your techs, or resources to meet a surge in demand, Kinettix can provide the planning, staffing, and management services to get the job done. We offer:
> Projects: On-demand technicians for installs or rollouts
> Dispatch: On-demand technicians for maintenance
> FieldFlex℠: Flexible IT coordination services
> Staff Aug: Contingent talent to scale or meet surges in demand
Kinettix makes it simple to get the service you need fast. We receive requests via email, phone calls, shared worksheets, and, most significantly, through an API to our Dispatch1® FSM software. Through a connection to our Dispatch1 portal, we can provide you with an API-driven platform that gives you global dispatch capabilities.