Why focus on mobile experience in 2020: In Conversation with Syniverse

This article was adapted from a Syniverse blog post. Bill Hurley, its Chief Marketing Officer graced our CXO Forum 2019  with his presence on 15 October 2019.

The biggest challenge mobile operators face today is understanding their role in an age of massive digital transformation. Each one of these operators’ customers is undergoing exactly that, powered in large by mobile experiences.

As such, it is crucial to create and empower superb mobile experiences that relate to the needs of this transformation.

Bill discusses this vision in greater depth with our CEO, Ong Geok Chwee in this video:

Geok Chwee: If you look at the changes and disruption in the telco world, what should we be focusing on?
Bill: It’s about digital transformation, even though it is a ‘tired’ phrase to a degree. We look at digital transformation across four key initiatives: 

• Customer Experience: What is going on and what do you improve that for your customers, and their customers? That is the greatest opportunity in the mobile space–creating that mobile experience and tying it to that customer experience is important to digital transformation. 
• Operational Efficiency: How can you use mobile technology in the mobile engagement space, for your own and your customer’s costs, as they try to engage with their customers around the world? 
• Agility: This mobile world we live in is really all about how do I produce new products and services to meet the needs of the customers moving forward. 
• Security and Risk Management: How are we working together to provide those capabilities and provide secure, risk-managed environments to improve that customer experience so we can operate more efficiently and develop new products and services? 

Geok Chwee: Let’s focus on customer experience. Every operator is talking about it but so far, we have not seen any case studies from telcos. Where do you think is the gap, and together, what else can we be doing?
Bill: The gap is, walking in the customers’ shoes and understanding what is really going on. It is not about 5G. Yes they will talk about it and that’s the thing to talk about but tomorrow, it will be 6G and the next day it’ll be 7G.

It’s about understanding the needs of the customer and then give them the value. You can measure customer experience in terms of net promoter score (how many customers said I was wonderful today). It is also about building the deep relationship where you are providing continuous value. It is such that they are going to pay for it, but also going to enjoy it and bring to their customers in the market.

Where the telco industry has struggled in the past is, we think about the technology first in the context of customer experience, it is about walking in their shoes and understanding the challenges they face. Our ability to understand the difference and talk in that context is going to be the differentiator. 

Geok Chwee: How does success look like between us in our partnership? 
Bill: Firstly, success is about the partnership and ecosystem that needs to be built.

We did a survey earlier this year with 200 telcos. We asked them what was their single biggest challenge in the world of 5G. 47 percent said it was all the different partners they have to work with that they have never worked with before. Success for us is their ability to succeed in their core competencies in their telcos, and be able to bring those partners that can help them deliver on customer experience, operational efficiency, agility and security.

Secondly, it is also about monetization. It is how we can help the operators monetize what is going on in the market today. What are the types of processes and transactions? Monetizing with things in 5G and some of the other networking and mobile technologies that are arriving is going to present a new set of problems and opportunities. We can help them figure out how to monetize it rather than simply saying how much we will charge them.