CoralTree's roundup of 2014

So in good order and good end of year tradition, we felt it worthwhile to recap some of this year's blog articles and see if they correlate with what the key goings on are in the industry.

Customer Experience

We started off the year with a blog on Customer Experience, at the time it proved to be very popular and it remains one of our most read blog articles. This is probably because in this environment of reduced ARPUs, general financial instability, and diverging customer habits getting the upper hand on the competition has been driven, in no small way, by improving Customer Experience.

Maybe that includes getting rid of customer bills?... it might sound controversial, but one operator is already doing it. This is something that we covered in a blog post ingeniously titled "Customers don't really want bills".

Even with things starting to pan out for many operators, as the European economy strengthens, superior customer experience has definitely become something that consumers expect of operators and driving the efficiency agenda can play a part in that as well. Talking of efficiency... 

Operational Efficiencies 

Other ways that operators have sought to improve their bottom line and increase their profits is through operational efficiencies. The OSS side of things has had a lot of focus in recent months with all the talk - and hype? - surrounding 'NFV' (Network Functions Virtualisation).

But BSS efficiencies have been talked about in a variety of flavours and incantations. We covered such topics in "Do we understand the meaning of convergence?" and "Expectations that have sped ahead: efficiency is crucial". 

These topics appear to have dropped off the radar a little bit in the wake of all the NFV talk. However, the OSS/BSS bottleneck that currently prevents some operators maximising efficiencies in NFV, could see BSS efficiencies and even new BSS implementations (make sure you know why they sometimes fail!) being put in place to enable the full benefits of Network Functions Virtualisation integration.

Hopefully this means the topic will get a whole new lease of life!

Viewing Habits

Consumer changes in viewing habits have also come to the fore this year. From the extremes of customers ditching pay-tv services altogether, which have been becoming more of an issue for CSPs, as companies like Netflix become more prevalent. We've started covering this in part one of the "cord cutters/cord nevers" series. To customers general viewing habits changing a topic we looked at in "What’s next? Interactive multi-tasking!"

In a strange twist, North Korea has show just how much viewing habits have changed and how much ready consumers are for change.

With major US cinema chains pulling Sony's new film 'The Interview', but high public demand to view it, Sony called on On-Demand providers YouTube, Google Play, Microsoft Video and more recently iTunes to host the video for a nationwide release which earned them $18m. As much as they had aimed to earn via a national cinema release, so is this the end of the cinema?

We'll be looking at this ever more important topic in the new year.

What can we expect from the coming year? 

Well, all these topics have been high profile topics throughout 2014, but the industry is still far from implementing these features fully. So we should expect to see more of them over the coming year(s)! 

But there are a great many other things that might well present themselves in 2015, such as an increased focus on BSS systems that are able to provide flexible, personalised offerings to customers. Or an increase in telecoms companies adopting more non-traditional services, which are predicted to grow from 8-10% of income, to a potential 15-20% of revenue. This could help sure up bottom lines that are constantly under threat.

What ever the new year brings, Happy New Year, and all the best in 2015!