Commercial Product Catalog

BlueMarble Commerce - Digital Transformation Catalog

Time to market has been one of the major challenges for the telecommunications industry in the last decade, was the time it takes to bring new products to the market.

With products they mean things as simple as a new tariff or just a promotion or adding an option to an existing product. What is often exempted as it is generally accepted as very complex, is adding a completely new product offering, in particular comprising of several components, services and assets, spanning both digital as well as physical products.

The major reason telecommunication service providers are challenged with the speed of the product lifecycle is that their business IT infrastructure has evolved over many years. With acquisitions and consolidation often running several systems with similar functions in parallel.

Consolidating product definition into one place and feeding the backend systems from there, promises a faster and easier way for defining new products.

For a long time product catalogs have been promoted to solve the Time-to-Market challenge. But defining the products, tariffs, options and promotions is only the first step of the solution. It takes a broader look at selling these products to turn Time-to-Market to Time-to-Revenue. Even getting a central product catalog within a digital transformation process is not providing the capabilities that are required.

They need to be fitting the customers’ current context, but also consider availability to him. It is frustrating for a consumer to get an offer for super high-speed internet access only to find out that the service is not available where he lives.

And conditions can be very complex for telecommunication customers. With long running contracts, sometimes containing products that have been taken from the market long time ago, and complex rules defining the conditions under which they can be upgraded, makes customer relevance an interesting challenge.

Supporting this also become important with the increasing number of sales channels and the cost challenges for assisted channels. Streamlining the sales process to remove all irrelevant obstacles and making it a pleasant experience for the customer is essential for the business success of new products.

So beyond the pure product definition in a product catalog, there is also the need to integrate it well with the sales process and the corresponding rules and conditions for turning new products into revenue.

Customer journey equals customer satisfaction

The telecommunication service providers are traditionally selling products that are not only the services they offer directly, but also physical products, whether these are mobile phones, routers, set-top boxes or in the future connected devices for home security or energy control. In order to broaden their portfolio, they will very likely continue to integrate services from 3rd parties, which need to be included in the sales catalog.

When physical products are included in the portfolio, also the delivery of those products needs to be considered, because this will eventually have a big impact on the overall customer satisfaction. It is very dissatisfying to have a service charged, while the physical access has not been established or if you check for device availability in a store, just to find out it is not on stock when you arrive there. In order to live up to their brand promise CSP’s need to control this part of the customer journey during the sales process.

This is the framework which guided the design of the BlueMarble Commerce and Delivery Orchestration solution.

BlueMarble Commerce – system independent & consolidated

BlueMarble Commerce creates a sales catalog, a product catalog that focusses on the commercial aspects of the product portfolio based on all the technical product definitions maintained in the legacy business backend systems. BlueMarble Commerce is specifically designed to work with any backend system and not depending on a specific, consolidated backend IT infrastructure. As multi-play products and portfolios, including mobile, fixed, cable, IPTV and other products and bundles thereof, become increasingly important for Communication Service Providers, BlueMarble Commerce can work with any number of technical product catalogs.

The second key component is a cache of customer data from the backend systems. This is used to create a complete, 360-degree view on customer data – profile data, purchased and installed products, current orders and sales information.

These two components are the basis for the sales and delivery orchestration engine that uses a sophisticated rules engine to drive a successful sales process across all channels. This creates a consistent experience for the customer independent of the channel, even when he switches between touchpoints, and independent of the number of involved backend IT systems.

So, yes – a commercial product catalog is a key component in achieving shorter time-to-market, but in turning products into revenue more is required on top of the existing IT business infrastructure. Specially – to avoid long and expensive IT transformation projects.

Talk to us, so we can show you how BlueMarble can help you achieve quick market launch for new products successfully across all sales touchpoints.