The telecom industry’s trillion-dollar question: How CSPs can create and sustain new revenue streams?

For many years, the telecoms industry has focused on cost-cutting and optimizing operational efficiencies. Katarina Radman, Calvi’s Director of Product Marketing, explains why the focus is now shifting towards exploring new revenue streams and optimizing revenue-generating opportunities.

CSPs all have one thing in common: they’re facing growing economic pressure at the same time that they’re investing billions in new fiber and 5G networks.

For a number of years, revenue-eroding trends such as downward competitive pressure, regulatory impacts on pricing, an anemic retail market, as well as popular but less profitable products ate away at core revenue streams, making it urgent that CSPs find new sources of revenue.

But the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. The world moved online, digital transformation accelerated tenfold and new opportunities presented themselves due to enterprises needing assistance to support operational continuity, as well as helping to digitalize their sales and marketing efforts. From an operational perspective, CSPs rose to the challenge: providing the connectivity and services needed to support remote work, keep the engines of commerce turning, and ensure workers continued collaborating.

But while demand for telecoms services rose, how did these same CSPs do commercially?

Against a background of worldwide economic decline, the telecoms industry did quite well during the global pandemic - despite some service revenues (such as roaming) declining precipitously. Canada’s GDP fell by 5.4% in 2020 and the Eurozone’s by over 6% but even so, some CSPs managed to reverse years of revenue decline, and in the process increased their profits pointing a way forward for the industry.

ETIS, for example, reported that on average its members’ revenues dropped just 0.8%, but 29% of members actually increased their revenues and margins in 2020 (TeBIT 2020 report).

Whether CSPs can build sustainable revenue growth on the back of the digital shift stimulated by Covid-19 is the trillion-dollar question facing the industry today. Doing so requires them to leverage all their tools to support revenue-generating strategies, enable successful product innovation, and deliver against their customers’ ever-evolving digital expectations. This makes it imperative that they move beyond optimizing individual functions to join their digital silos into agile processes that are not only cost-effective and efficient but are also sufficiently flexible to allow them to pivot to new opportunities as these emerge.

ETIS noted in the 2020 TeBIT report that weaker areas for its members include price and margin optimization, as well as leveraging digitalization to create or support new offers, services, and business models. But what role will the bill play in helping CSPs roll out and monetize new services and quickly address new revenue-generating opportunities? Among other things, bills will need to: 

• address changing customer demand and the consumerization of B2B telecoms
• allow more dynamic segmentation
• transform into personalized and effective customer communications in order to boost customer satisfaction and increase sales from existing customers
• support product innovation rather than being an impediment to innovation
• enable and underpin new business models
• support inclusivity and ensure they meet the needs of all customers.

By taking the ‘right’ approach towards bill presentment software, CSPs can ensure they boost their commercial agility and are thriving by 2025 and not just surviving. 

Don’t be left behind. Accelerate revenue generation by listening to the on-demand webinar on the role bills play in the co-creation economy.