The telecom industry is an ever-growing one, with an infrastructure that is complex offering a myriad of services to clients of different sizes and segments. In such a changeable environment, telco companies should invest in streamlining the internal processes and improving their employees’ productivity by giving them tools that would make them as efficient as possible. On the other hand, they should keep the customers in mind as well, and provide tools that would ease customer access to the services and products. This is where custom application development comes into play. Custom application development lets you define what you need, where you need it, and how you want it to be while optimizing and streamlining the business processes. There is no limit to the areas in a telco enterprise that can be covered with a custom application, i.e. applications for Organizational Management, Customer Management, Service Management… anything that might come to mind. Let’s go a bit deeper into how custom applications in these areas can increase your business agility.
Organizational management applications
Organizational management applications have a wide scope and include workforce management applications and everything that comes under this subject, such as talent acquisition, talent management, on-boarding and off-boarding of employees, payroll and salary calculation, absence and vacation, travel, and business. Each of them includes a set of sub-processes which if digitalized properly provide the following benefits to telco companies:
- Increased employee efficiency
- A pool of knowledge which will be easily shared within the enterprise
- Lower mistakes that might appear due to the manual insertion of data
- Increased employee satisfaction by precisely calculating the salary with its addition (bonuses, awards, etc.)
- Automated onboarding and off-boarding processes will provide the HR department with spare time to focus on other more important things
- Fast and easy tracking of employees’ career path
- Automated creation of business travel letters
The payroll calculation is probably one of the most important aspects that influence employees’ satisfaction, which in turn influences enterprise efficiency. Employees’ salary, career path, and motivation to work are linked to each other, and if one lacks then the effects will be felt in all of them. That’s why telcos should pay special attention to the way they calculate the salary taking into consideration all the work that is being done during the month, any bonuses, overtime working, and additional aspects. In order to ensure a mistake-less process, automation of the processes that fall under the salary calculation should be done, which will ultimately lead to an automated and optimized salary calculation process. In this sense, we have created various solutions to digitalize and automate many of the business processes in the human resource department of clients in various industries, such as:
- On-boarding process automation
- Connecting internal HR systems to improve payroll process and transparency
- Automating the process of requesting and approving business trip letters
- Automation of the hiring process
- Enhancing HR department during COVID-19 by introducing a new HR case management system in ServiceNow
- Enhancing enterprise efficiency by improving employees’ activities tracking process
Customer management applications
As the telco industry continues to grow and expand, so do the business lines, products, and services they offer to B2B and B2C segments. To keep their customers’ level of satisfaction high and to even improve it, telco companies should strive to provide a unique and personalized customer experience by building efficient self-care portals, a highly responsive customer support center, and various applications that would improve customer acquisition process. When these three aspects are automated and aligned, you will be able to:
- Manage customer interactions appropriately
- Significantly improve the time needed to respond to your customers
- Enhance customer satisfaction by being available to them whenever and wherever they want
- Increase the efficiency and productivity of your sales teams by having implementing efficient cross-department collaboration tools
- Optimize the management of new customers
- Modernize your online store and the way customers access your services and products
The business benefits that you will experience from having custom applications for these three highly-important aspects are the following:
- A high rate of accomplishing crucial business goals
- Robust functionality
- Ensured customer satisfaction
- Increased profitability
- Competitive advantage and accelerated time to value
- Accurate forecast of customer behavior based on proper data management
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Service management applications
Last, but not least by importance is the Service Management part of telcos. Service Management along with Customer Management and Organizational Management makes the entire enterprise. As such, service management includes the process of continuous design, delivery, managing, and improvement of the services that telcos provide to the end-users to ensure that needs are met. Therefore, if the processes and services are aligned with the business objectives the organization will definitely grow. Why is application development important here and how it influences business agility?
First of all, let’s outline the processes that service management includes (see picture below).
All these processes are tightly connected with the services and products that you as a company offer to your customers, and their effectiveness affects the effectiveness of the entire enterprise. In cases when they are automated and streamlined, there is a consistent information flow among them, cross-process connection, which increases operational efficiency and lower telcos costs. For instance, a custom application for your invoice processing processes (Account Payable and Account Receivables) will not only automate the process but also ensure that the process is fully fault-free, decreasing the time and chances for incorrect invoices, as well as delayed invoice sending. Thus, your custom application for invoice processing will decrease the time needed for your employees to manually insert and process information (Account Receivable), allowing them to focus on more important tasks than doing the manual work. Furthermore, you will be able to get detailed reports making you aware of any gaps that might appear increasing your ability to adapt to any changes in a fast and efficient way.
Effective custom applications that will automate and streamline your processes build a strong foundation for further improvement, boost the impact that you have in the global market, deepens the relationship that you have with your customers and employees leading to more profitable growth.
⋮IW has been devoted to delivering custom application solutions to clients since 2004. This has been recognized by Microsoft, and since 2013 we are part of Microsoft Partner Network as Gold Partners, with Gold Competency in Application Development.
Our technical consultants are devoted to delivering exponential value to our clients all the time by providing end-to-end solutions that best suit our client’s needs. If you want to discuss and check how custom application solutions would benefit your business, reach out – we would be more than happy to discuss any topic that you have.
