How SaaS Affects the Telecom Industry

Software as a service (SaaS) is changing every business it touches and the telecommunications industry is no exception.

An Entrepreneur report reveals that the SaaS market has been growing exponentially and is expected to grow up to $164.29 billion by 2022.

A significant reason for this massive increase is the ability of SaaS to help individuals and telecommunication companies work more efficiently and increase overall productivity.

With dynamic telecom SaaS solutions in place, organizations can simplify their operations and eliminate the need of deploying and managing infrastructure. This means that telecommunication companies will no longer have to worry about application updates and patches. Thereby, enabling them to concentrate on delivering high-quality service to its customers.

Regardless of its overwhelming benefits, many are still confused about exactly which functions SaaS can support and which cloud service is best for telecom company organizations. More often than not, leaders cannot implement a framework that allows for increased agility in service deployment because of their inability to maximize the advantages that SaaS brings into their operations.

5 Ways SaaS Affects the Telecom and How to Leverage It:

In this article, we’ll outline several ways SaaS is affecting telecom to help you make the best use of innovative solutions in the market and improve overall operations.

1. Accelerate Digital Transformation

Digital transformation is becoming a key component to helping organizations flourish as the world grapples with the changes brought by the pandemic. Recent data shows that roughly 58% of organizations that had not yet initiated a digital transformation program reveal that the pandemic has sped up their efforts.

By using SaaS technologies, telecommunication companies can quickly deploy agile application frameworks that improve resource allocation and reduce overall complexity. This enhances business agility and allows telecommunication companies to embrace a constant pace of change. With an unmatched business agility, you can meet evolving user demands whether that means scaling down in times of constriction or scaling up to meet growth needs.

This way, you can provide a minimum service level even in case of failure, ensuring customer satisfaction while simultaneously reducing unnecessary downtime that could damage your reputation. SaaS telecom solutions can also be improved continuously to ensure that the technology supports their needs going forward.

Unlike traditional software deployments which require the purchase of new updates, SaaS provides you with limitless scalability and continuous functionality improvement which are critical in achieving digital transformation.

2. Eliminate Legacy Systems

It is not uncommon for telecommunication companies to leverage legacy systems in their existing operations. After all, legacy systems are familiar and replacing them can be arduous and time-consuming. However, it does not change the fact that most of these systems have functionality issues and provide businesses with a limited flexibility to grow.

Additionally, they can reduce employee efficiency dramatically and increase overall dissatisfaction. The advantage of SaaS technologies is it allows telecom companies to get rid of legacy systems to guarantee continuity of critical processes. This way, you can improve cost optimization and free up resources to initiate innovation.

You Can Also Read: Adopting Telecom SaaS Will Reduce IT Cost By 25%, Spending to Rise to 11% by 2023 – Research

Eliminating legacy systems also allows telecommunication companies to reduce application incidents and improve utilization. Many legacy systems are no longer supported by their manufacturers which mean that a single unpatched weakness can result in attackers obtaining applications and databases. By using SaaS technologies, you no longer have to hire employees with online cyber security degrees to perform the necessary software updates and patches since the provider will be responsible for keeping the software relevant to your needs.

3. Reduce Customer Acquisition Costs

Reduced acquisition cost is one of the benefits of cloud computing in telecom. Winning the marketing game has been difficult for companies in the telecommunication industry where consumers are bombarded with messages 24/7. It also does not help that the cost per acquisition has been rising exponentially as competition intensifies and audiences become less receptive to traditional messaging.

Traditionally, telecommunication startups were relegated to sidelines as top players enjoyed a monopoly. However, the emergence of SaaS technologies has empowered small players to compete in the market and win their share of customers. This is because SaaS allows them to deliver enterprise-class services while keeping the infrastructure overheads and costs to a minimum.

In doing so, small and medium-sized telecom companies can acquire customers effectively while simultaneously optimizing revenue flow. Usually, telecom companies struggle in finding the right combination of analytical and tactical strategies to acquire customers. By using SaaS solutions, they can gather key customer information to understand the behaviors and interactions of their target market and make the necessary adjustments to acquire them cost-efficiently.

4. Better Collaboration

The importance of collaboration is too hard to ignore for telecom companies, especially nowadays wherein most employees are tethered to their homes. As a business leader, you have to provide your remote employees with the right tools to deliver the service expected by your customers.

With SaaS tools, telecommunication companies can manage calls, share feedback, track times, and exchange ideas.

Through this process, you can ensure that your remote employees stay on top of their tasks and deadlines. Thereby, reducing costs and timelines while simultaneously improving costs and increasing returns on investments. SaaS-based technologies are also cloud-based, which means that employees can use them regardless of their time zones and geographic locations.

This is particularly essential for telco organizations aiming to help employees do their jobs well in a flexible working environment. SaaS tools also lets you monitor team performance using easy-to-understand dashboards to recognize patterns in employees’ communication with services. It also allows you to automate mundane administrative tasks and streamline the repetitive aspects of your process to help your operations grow quicker.

5. Improve Billing

The telecom industry has experienced tremendous increase and with this growth comes challenges such as capturing real-time usage and billing. Often, telcos fail to bring their services to market in time because of the poor billing systems they have implemented. These billing systems usually lack an efficient online charging plugin, reducing their effectiveness in the modern telecom industry.

By employing cloud for telecom operators, you can have a single and centralized view of concepts related to your operations. This includes call detail records which contain billing data related to the call such as call time, destination, source number, and call duration. This makes it easier for you to invoice everyone since the solution divides customers into several batches, with each group having a particular billing cycle.

An advanced SaaS billing system also ensures that duplicate records are eradicated from the system to achieve higher accuracy, reduce redundancy, and eliminate the risks of inaccurate payments. This way, you can implement tariff changes easily in the billing process. Some challenges that the UCaaS industry faces are CDR processing and tax compliance. It can be time-consuming and prone to errors to manually process CDR files from multiple carriers and calculate the correct tax while ensuring accurate invoices.

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