'There seems to be a new future for voice services'

By Ibrahim Ahmad

With over two decades of experience in the telecom and IT industry, Sanjay Sharma has held a number of executive roles with global organizations, including Amdocs, IBM Global Services, Huawei and Samsung.

Prior to his current role at Redknee as Regional VP and Head for the South West Asia region, he was heading Amdocs business for the South West Asia region, and before Amdocs he was heading the carrier software and core network business unit of Huawei Telecommunications for the region.

Sharma spoke to Voice&Data to share Redknee's views on the technology and business challenges and trends in telecom, and how Redknee will offer competitive edge to its customers.

Voice&Data: Operators have been trying to update their voice services to compete with all the OTT players, including Skype and Whatsapp, in this space. What is your view on this?

Sanjay Sharma: With Voice-over-LTE emerging and seamless handover to Voice -over-Wifi becoming a reality, there seems to be a new future for voice services. Usage of cloud services (private, public and hybrid) and the spread of virtualization among operators will change the industry. Virtualizing services not only reduces initial investment costs and operational expenses, but also enables a more flexible business setup.

As Internet based operators have demonstrated, utilizing a cloud environment can make launching new services very fast. Cloud will help operators gain momentum and also open up new opportunities.

Voice&Data: How do you think BSS will play a key role for operators to achieve the promises of a profitable multi-play offering?

Sanjay Sharma: As operators struggle to consolidate their billing and customer care platforms and the corresponding products into a modern IT infrastructure that supports innovation, getting into new areas like IoT, again creates challenges.

Successful multi-play offerings will require a streamlined, fast and decisive approach towards BSS, if operators don’t want to be stuck in organizational and infrastructure complexity.

I think there will be more emphasis on BSS evolution in the near future.

Voice&Data: How do you see customer service evolving in very competitive telecom market ?

Sanjay Sharma:Earlier, there was a lot of focus on the touchpoints that influence customer experience, like proactively engaging with the customer in case of network problems, or having all customer information consistently available when the customer calls the operator. This will now be taken to the next level, where customer interactions are tracked in real-time and personalized marketing campaigns are created based on customer behavior and analytics.

As customer experience management evolves we will see this method extended towards partners within the operator’s ecosystem, helping to enable new business models and revenue streams around campaigns and promotions.

Voice&Data: What changes do you envision in engaging with the customer in real-time?

Sanjay Sharma: Redknee is the largest independent provider of real-time monetization and subscriber management software. Big data has pushed the value of business intelligence and analytics in all business areas. However, in many domains we still see a conventional approach to viewing data, such as creating dashboards or corporate reports.

While this is an important aspect of controlling the business, it does not tap into the full potential of data. In the future, we will see the rise and increasing emphasis of two additional areas of analytics; exploratory analytics and automated or autonomous analytics. BSS at the center of service usage and commercial data will play an essential role in enabling all analytics scenarios to enable competitive advantages in the future.

Voice&Data: It is said that Vodafone India is using Redknee solution to provide personalized data services and differentiated tariff and price options to enhance the customer experience. Your views.

Sanjay Sharma: Vodafone India is using Redknee technology to deliver the benefits of real-time charging to its pan-India active pre-paid and post-paid data subscribers. The operator is leveraging our unified charging to boost its data subscribers' adoption and enhance customer satisfaction.

In addition, Vodafone is using our customer care solution to provide advanced customer care and self-service on web and smart devices, and engage with them using their customers' favourite social media platforms.

This significant solution upgrade highlights Redknee's expertise to enable Tier 1 service providers with innovative, real-time solutions to support their next generation network investments and deliver superior support to customers.

Our converged charging solution is playing an key role in Vodafone India's ability to effectively drive customer

loyalty and generate new revenue. Besides Vodafone, in India we are working with some other leading Tier 1 operators too.

Voice&Data: How has been Redknee's performance in some of the established and emerging markets?

Sanjay Sharma: The real-time feature has been proving to be game changer. For instance in the APAC market, our customer have got over 20% increase in data revenue; in the Central and Latin American market we have been able to get over 10% overall revenue growth; even in North America, a very mature market, we have been able to over 50% more growth for our customers compared to the market average.