Although the connectivity services provided by telecommunication companies are just as important as ever, today’s customers expect more. In addition to voice, messaging, and data, telcos have expanded into other vertical offerings targeting both enterprise and consumer market segments with digital services tailored to each.
In large parts of the world, wireless providers are customers’ first point of contact with the Internet. Many telcos in these regions have expanded to e-health and mobile banking in addition to traditional service bundles. Given their unique positioning in these markets, telecommunication companies have a singularly powerful ability to drive traffic to their own digital services offerings.
Business-Focused Services
Given their close proximity to consumers —both physically and in terms of network latency—telcos now offer business services like cloud computing, business IoT products, and machine-to-machine (M2M) connectivity.
Business users are willing to pay more for a faster connection to their customers, so offering cloud services is a smart play. Telcos can leverage existing assets, like their networking capabilities, data centers and software base, to develop a cloud services ecosystem. Over the last decade, more and more telecommunication providers have expanded their business-to-business services portfolio to include cloud services. What was a pipe dream in the early 2010s is now an increasingly common strategy.
Consumer-Focused Services
With cloud and business connectivity serving the corporate market, telcos have also started looking to integrate consumer-focused services, like entertainment, mobile banking, and electronic health. Just recently, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, a number of major companies in Africa started offering mobile banking software utilizing their existing customer bases and competencies.
Throughout the world, over-the-top streaming entertainment services have become exceedingly popular. As telcos begin to realize the opportunity to implement these services themselves, entertainment services coming from these companies are popping up fast. Given that many of them already offer television services, they already have the relationships with content networks and studios, not to mention their existing customer bases.
In other parts of the developing world, wireless providers have begun to offer e-health services intended to stop the spread of the coronavirus. These services take advantage of their close relationship with millions of customers and their connections to governments and international organizations that can help.
What’s Next?
The world is changing rapidly. With it, telecommunications companies are adapting to consumers’ and businesses’ increasing expectations and desires. Through their unique positioning in both business-facing and consumer markets, telcos can offer services that would traditionally fall well outside their wheelhouse.
On the business side, features like cloud computing, corporate IoT, and business-focused connectivity are making inroads. Similarly, for consumers, telcos are using their market position to build services like e-health, mobile banking, and entertainment—all things that would normally be purchased from outside the traditional telecommunications company.
From cloud computing to mobile banking, telcos are expanding to meet today’s demands on all sides of the market.
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