Telecommunications, like every industry, is changing. Change is often scary, but resistance will only negatively impact your business more in both the short and long run.

While facing less demand and dwindling profits but greater expectations, the future of traditional telco looks bleak.

By deploying new technologies, telco will become more agile and flexible. Any modern-day business must have such qualities, but being adaptable without great financial cost will prove challenging.

According to EY’s Digital Transformation for 2020 and Beyond research, the burden of legacy IT platforms and architecture is seen as the greatest barrier to telco digital transformation. Adjusting to digital can be difficult and, for some, unreasonable.

With increased competition and decreased profits, it’s not surprising vendors have little budget to reinvest into their business, never mind vast development of their ecosystems.

Nevertheless, the storm will ease. As the digital economy continues to grow at such an exponential pace, technological solutions will emerge. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will solve great challenges across the board.

The timescale, however, is unknown. And affordability as equally as abstract. Will your business survive another cold quarter?

But hope is not lost

Today, there is one solution. Automation allows vendors to cut overhead spending without jeopardizing current offerings, and all while actually increasing positive customer experiences to reduce churn.

In both industrial and consumer markets, automation is playing a huge role in day-to-day life. It allows businesses to streamline processes while enhancing productivity and ensuring customers receive on-demand communication. This is evident all around us, whether you’re ordering take-out, a taxi or new machinery for your factory.

The need for automation is particularly true in the voice industry, both wholesale and commercial. Phone number ordering has been identified as one of the most inefficient processes still undertaken manually by traditional telephony providers.

Currently, there is a long journey between contacting an agent to an activated phone number. With automation, this can be done within a matter of clicks and minutes.

By deploying a third-party tool such as the SpeakIntelligence webshop widget, vendors can collapse their entire back office while enhancing productivity, speeding-up orders from weeks to days, and improving customer service through custom call routing packages.

This is all especially helpful for telcos providing international numbers. Without automation, orders can be held up due to lengthy processes where different contracts must be negotiated in different countries. For telephony providers, deploying an automation widget like this means you are able to avoid financially-heavy elements once essential in business, such as an office and large team. All you need now is your website.

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The automation of business processes also increases scalability and consistency by removing manual tasks and room for human error. This reinforces other benefits, such as improved customer service and order time.

New technology presents a chance for new opportunities and a goldmine of untapped potential for telcos whose main offering is not telephony or number providing. The ease of implementing and maintaining automation tools which take care of services for you means others can set automation up and benefit from an extra stream of revenue.

The benefits are clear. Leveraging automation which focuses on cost reduction and improved efficiency is sure to play a fundamental role in any legacy vendor’s long-term operational, or even survival, strategy. Automation provides a tech-orientated solution to core problems facing telco including a changing industry, a saturated market and little customer loyalty.

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