For as long as I can remember, telcos have always been seen as just a dumb pipe, good enough to deliver connectivity, but never quite able to successfully associate their brand with over the top (OTT) services, and more.  Which is a shame because the network infrastructure which they invest millions if not billions into, enable many services and capabilities.

Telecommunication players have more opportunity to influence than we think. It’s not just the vast amount of customer and telemetry data that they can have at their disposal. The nature of their business calls for multiple touch points for customers to interact with their brand, and they are always in our pockets because we never leave home without our phones.

I have used all the main telco services that the Malaysian market has to  offer. The last service I used before I settled to my current one, is recognisable from its blue logo and at one time, it boasted having nationwide service coverage due to its ties to the incumbent fixed line provider. Mind you, having cellular service in Sabah and Sarawak was a very big deal about ten years ago.

Well, the telco industry has come a long way since then, and any of the main four telco players that does not have coverage in East Malaysia today can let itself discreetly out of the door. 

Widely perceived as a utility service, how do telco services differentiate themselves from their peers in the industry?

Starting the right conversations 

Richard Im, Head of cloud and data analytics at CelcomDigi, shared from very early on in the interview that he is in the business of solving people’s problems, despite the many previous role titles he has had. He also firmly believes that a telco service provider like CelcomDigi can have that problem-solver role for businesses.

There is the “dumb pipe” reputation that telcos have  to contend with however. Richard explained, “For example, CelcomDigi is perceived as just a telecommunications company. If I were to go to a business and say ‘I’m here to solve your problem, they will say ‘No, because we don’t believe you are an IT company.’”

Business conversations may begin as, ‘How much bandwidth do you want? or ‘How many SIM cards do you need?’ and even ‘I didn’t know you do cloud, or cybersecurity, so how can you help me with this?’

Marketing activities can build awareness about the other capabilities that telcos have, cloud, analytics, and automation, for instance, and ultimately it helps these communications and connectivity  service providers start business conversations on the right footing.

“It’s a conversation with not networking people, but business people and business teams. And they are very uncomfortable about that.  But, it’s a shift that needs to happen,” he said.

Product marketing and building what the market wants

At a glance, Richard has a non-marketing title but he quickly sets the record right. He sees himself heading up products end-to-end which comprises product marketing, product launch, market strategies, and more. In fact his previous role at Axiata Group level – developing growth market strategies, creating partnerships, and streamlining sales process, customer engagement, and more – segues nicely into his current role of being on the ground now and implementing the strategies.

“Head of cloud and data analytics at CelcomDigi, is not a marketing role per se, but there is a strong go-to-market component and you need to answer questions like what the product is for, who it is for, and what its value proposition is.”

This product understanding, as well as its communication and marketing is a very important part of what Richard does. “If I develop a new product and no one knows about it, then it’s not going to go anywhere.”

Technology plays an important role in helping Richard determine and deliver a product, or experience, that the market actually wants. For example at the moment, he is looking a lot into the use of different types of AI in customer service.

The thinking behind this is that customers do not necessarily want to talk to an agent on the telephone, and are instead looking for different channels to interact with brands. Customers struggle a lot with customer service, and with that as a problem statement he matches it with solutions that are at his disposal like generative AI, or voice AI. “AI chat, for example, is much more intelligent than the traditional chatbot, in terms of the tasks it can do to solve issues for customers,” he said.

“It’s a conversation with not networking people, but business people and business teams. And they are very uncomfortable about that. But, it’s a shift that needs to happen.”

Richard sees two ways to approach product development and product marketing – the first being the typical approach of taking solutions that exist and going to market with it, to test and gather feedback about traction of its use and its impact to the customer. If the outcome is positive then it is possible for the telco to consider building out their own capability.

“So it’s a bit of a journey. If I try to build a capability from Day One, it will never launch because it takes so long and it’s too difficult,” he opined.

New battlegrounds

Circling back to that question about how telco players differentiate themselves from each other. Richard observed that the telecommunications industry is saturated, and it’s not a high growth area.

“It is growing in the sense of connectivity, but it is not growing in terms of IP and new technologies,” he said.

Recognizing this, Axiata Digital, the company that Richard worked at previously, wants to tap into new growth areas via brands they have developed like Boost (an online payment service), ADA (data analytics and advertising), and APIGate (API platform and services).

There is also a new battleground for local telco players, 5G, although it is not so much about who can deploy 5G the fastest and farthest. A government-owned shared infrastructure sees to it that the incumbent telcos have equal access and that 5G cost can be kept low for consumers. Telcos need only to focus on building that killer 5G application and delivering it to the masses. In some ways, it frees up telcos to do this, as well as focus on value-adding activities that can uniquely differentiate them.

When CXpose.tech caught up with Richard, he shared just as much. “It’s hard to differentiate between telco brands based on just costing now.”

The recent merger between Celcom and Digi sees the new merged entity CelcomDigi, working to integrate their respective capabilities; be it from the technology and network perspective, the culture, talents, and skills perspective, and even the retail go-to-market aspect. Richard opined that the emphasis is to ensure that customer experience is not impacted, and that there is a lot to be done to merge the two entities together in terms of branding and products.

In fact, there is cognizance that the technology merger is challenging but it is not as challenging as the people and culture aspect.

“This takes time and there is a lot happening because it is all quite complex in terms of integration,” he concluded. In the meantime, the industry shall watch with interest how the whole scenario will pan out.

SUMMARY

Having experienced our first merger in the industry, much talked about infrastructure-sharing finally happening, and with 5G on the horizon and ripe with the promise of many new services and capabilities, it is certainly an exciting time for telecommunications players and users in Malaysia.