The new world order

Mark struggles to connect from his home to deliver a crucial presentation that is due in an hour. Amy wants to negotiate a quote with her client and it’s been 3 weeks since she last heard from them. Thomas is worried because he received a call to fix a router at a customer premise since that area is infected badly. Do these scenarios sound familiar? Welcome to the new world order of social distancing and lockdowns.

Can we imagine a world without having to go to a brick-and-mortar store and rather experience products in a virtual store and interact with virtual citizens? A world without having to go to a crowded stadium to catch your favorite team in action, purchase virtual tickets from your telcos and subscribe to flexible plans to ensure assured QoS during the event instead? This could be the new normal in years to come.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted industries and impacted human lives like never before. It has presented significant challenges to businesses across the world to sustain and adapt to emerging new norms like “No handshakes”, “Social distancing”, “Lockdowns” etc., all without impacting customer experience. CSPs across the world are playing a pivotal role in this space since millions of people being at home translates to a colossal load on their network traffic. Moreover, most of the residential lines are seldom scalable to meet the stresses and strains of enterprise business, let alone the network resiliency. Onboarding an ecosystem of players without human interaction was far-fetched for CSPs till recently, and managing them without site visits and interpersonal meetings makes it tougher for them to fathom. Not that these are impossible for them to conceive, but often, such radical transformations demand huge investments – both money and time. Having to operate with a skeletal workforce and crippled logistics causes major threats to survival if not addressed soon, since customers demand ‘brutal’ levels of experience in these testing times.

Collaborative communities to help and assist, onboarding a wide ecosystem of partners, launching virtual stores and remote site visits, zero touch payments, On-demand bifurcation of residential and enterprise usage wide plans, single touch quote to order, are some of the key journeys CSPs would mandate.

Wipro’s COVID marketplace solution is envisaged to provide a holistic platform to cater to such business needs. It comes with a curated library of COVID-specific customer journeys starting from online onboarding of partners and customers, listing specific offers, virtual sales and assist, instant quotes, zero-touch fulfillment etc. It also has a set of mobile apps for ‘On the move’ communities like sales agents, field engineers etc. to help them work remotely and still provide seamless support and service to their customer base. Enterprise segments such as small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) are probably the best exponents of such a marketplace since there is no need to set up their own portals and infrastructure and getting started is very simple.

COVID marketplace – Straight from the oven

Having a uniform platform with the ability to launch bespoke COVID offers at digital speed, provide control and choice to the user community, rendering human-less sales, guidance & care, building

• Ability to reach a wide array of customers and compete with household names in respective product categories
• Innovative tools and business services provided by the platform allows flexibility
• Multiple business models can be supported. Example: SMEs can partner with a logistics firm for shipment or choose to exploit the services rendered by large CSPs owning such marketplaces for fulfillment and delivery
• No Investment needed toward customer discovery, acquisition, and driving traffic toward their respective portals
• Launching new products is very easy and inbuilt analytics tracks sales performance
• Agentless sales and service helps in efficiency in workforce management

COVID-19 marketplace – Capabilities delivered across the value chain

Future beyond the pandemic

Wipro’s wide array of business solutions provides the necessary impetus to roll out our marketplace by cross leveraging in-house value propositions such as analytics-based insights, automation, virtual agents etc. At this juncture, enterprises (B2B) and consumers (B2C) are both at the receiving end. While the former struggles to rally an ecosystem to keep it alive whilst complying with the new world order, the latter finds it difficult to differentiate services that are consumed. Usage levels are skyrocketing and consumers demand specific business solutions to augment their day-to-day lives during the lockdown. Enterprises need a B2C like ‘Buy and care’ more than ever to sustain let alone grow paradigms. Wipro’s marketplace brings all the stakeholders onto a single platform with pre-integrated components and COVID-specific user journeys to deliver world-class customer experience. It also ensures seamless business continuity for CSPs while ensuring that the safety and well- being of their employees, partners, and customers are not compromised.

5G has announced itself on the scene and is already knocking on the door. What makes this marketplace more relevant is that the platform can be used to host 5G ready digital services as and when CSPs get geared up for 5G’s commercial launch in the coming years. CSPs will inherently move away from traditional voice and data and host a wide gamut of new-age services across verticals like healthcare, gaming, consumer, manufacturing, travel and logistics, etc. Having a unified platform provides CSPs the ability to accelerate their digital initiatives and enhance their portfolio.

Swaminathan C N

Principal Consultant, Communications BU

Swami is part of the Domain Consulting team. He has 12 years of global experience spanning business consulting, solution architecture, product management, and process & journey re-imagination. He has driven several experience transformation initiatives within the BU as well as for global clients. An ardent sports lover, he regularly finds time to play badminton and cricket, and loves to read.