Mobile operator Cell C and ICT solutions provider Huawei have joined forces, in an effort to facilitate the former’s transition into a customer-centric, digital lifestyle company.
This, as telcos across the board scale to become more than just connectivity providers, evolving to be what has been termed a ‘techco’.
Cell C indicates the partnership with Huawei follows the launch of the business support systems (BSS) transformation project, and co-operation for digital service and customer experience management, aimed at providing end-users with an enhanced digital experience.
To reset the organisation into the new way of doing business, IT systems must be flexible to enable digital services and customer experience improvements, says a statement, adding the partnership with Huawei will help achieve this.
As part of the transformation process, Huawei will deploy a cloud-native BSS solution across Cell C’s different business lines and customer segments, to improve its agility and modernising its BSS in readiness for future business rollouts.
Says Cell C CEO Douglas Craigie Stevenson: “Cell C is moving away from being a pure telco to a techco provider, and customer-centricity is pivotal to this future. Our IT systems need to be able to support us in this journey as we become a digital business with simpler business flows.
“This means removing complexities from our user journeys and being able to respond better to our customers' needs. Through collaborations and partnerships like this one with Huawei, we will be able to launch more innovative products and services to our customers. Huawei brings a proven success record in other markets with their latest solutions and experience, and Cell C will leverage this expertise to create customer value.
“Cell C has been working with Huawei for over a decade and this project will build on the strong partnership that already exists between us, which for us is another step forward in addressing our customers’ needs and getting our ideas out to market quicker.”
“We are very happy to enter into this new phase of our relationship with Cell C,” adds Fortune Wang, carrier business director at Huawei SA. “Our next-generation BSS is a cloud-native BSS solution, which will enable Cell C to simplify their products, while still offering a lot of flexibility to customers.
“Business is evolving and processes are becoming more complex with the introduction of many partner products into the ecosystem, but our solution fully aligns to TMForum guidelines.”
The once ailing Cell C completed its long-awaited cash-raising exercise in September, which concluded with binding agreements with key financial backers.
Following the exercise to recapitalise the business, Cell C’s leadership expressed the company is ready to move forward and redefine its position in the South African telecoms space.
With the recapitalisation now complete, Cell C looks to start afresh and focus on growth by investing in high-value opportunities around its digital business, according to the company.
Speaking yesterday at a panel discussion about the evolution of African telcos at the Africa Tech Festival, in Cape Town, Ashraf Paruk, who heads up Cell C’s digital transformation, commented that the mobile operator recognises the techco transition also focuses on customer engagement around their lifestyle and so forth.
“That shift has created in Cell C a very strong tension of how we operate in this new world because we don’t have the kind of mental load of how much effort you spend on it. That has freed us up I think in the last 12 months of the journey we’ve been going through to kind of think of what is this techco.
“We seem to assume that techco is a thing you’re going to become but it’s actually a way of working – it’s a way of responding to markets. There is no better fit for what Africa is and the opportunity it presents than the techco way of working.”
Commenting on ecosystems and the value of partnerships in the journey to a techco, Paruk stated: “This new techco world is an open world. If you’re not bringing in as many partners, you’re not seeing them as one-on-one relationships.
“We had a conversation a couple of weeks back that said which insurer are you going to work with? The simple fact is if you just go with one, you’re not creating an ecosystem and restricting that particular relationship to a very binary thing. The idea is that you create the enabling tools and economic models to partner with various players in the industry and then to trigger access that never previously existed is a shift in the way the operator and techco sees itself.”
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