Last week I posted a link to the comment I wrote for Ovum on the topic of the Social Telco. While I spent some time in that piece talking about what that actually means, most of it was context, so I wanted to expand a little on what I mean by the Social Telco, starting with the drivers behind this shift.
Two major reasons why telcos need to become social
There are two major reasons why telcos need to become social:
their users are migrating to other platforms and leaving the telco behind telcos are bad at creating services and need to tap into the innovation happening elsewhere.I dealt with the first of these in the comment I linked to above and in a previous post and so I won’t return to it in depth here. Briefly, customers - especially those we might describe as belonging to Generation Y, and also referred to sometimes as Millennials - are increasingly bypassing the wireline telco (and to a lesser extent the mobile operator) when communicating with friends and family. As such, if telcos want to have commercial relationships with these customers, they need to find ways to re-engage them and that means going where they can be found.
Secondly, telcos are abysmal at creating new services that customers actually want. I’ll deal with this in more detail in a later post, but the major barrier to telco innovation has been the industry structure. Equipment vendors sold to engineers, who decided together with marketing which features to switch on. Of all the major new forms of communication that have emerged over the last 20 years, telcos have been responsible for none. Telcos are in a poor position to experiment with new services, too - everything they launch has to be scalable, robust and integrated with billing systems and so on, which makes timescales long and requires a high degree of certainty that a new product or service will succeed, which drastically limits their opportunities for experimentation. Internet players are in a much better position and have a far better recent track record, and telcos can benefit from this work.
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