API’s, TM Forum Standards, Customer Satisfaction & Cost To Serve – Fact or Fiction or a Challenge of Timing

As the CP/Partner/SI and MSP markets accelerate to take the new NGA services from Openreach (OR) and the plethora of new Altnets – API’s and the order aggregation hub’s like Fibre Café are becoming key in “stitching” together all these different Service Providers into a more simple integration model by the “downstream” channel partners and SI’s, MSP’s etc.

By moving to TM Forum based models, or Community Hub’s like Fibre Café, the integration challenge becomes easier/more consistent and the current wisdom suggests that it will speed the adoption of the patchwork quilt of providers and drive choice, reduce cost to serve and improve the customer experience.

While in the longer term this is likely true and is why Salesforce bought Mulesoft in 2018 for £6.5 billion pounds, the real challenge that is currently becoming obvious is that there are still a number of implementation and timing challenges that need reviewing/addressing in parallel to the API’s themselves

1. Does a CP/partner have the customer data hierarchy that adequately allows efficient integration to the full suite of provisioning and other operational commands and facilitates the customer reporting
2. Is the target CRM able to fully “ingest & surface” the richness of the detailed Provisioning/Assurance/Billing/Checker data being sent into their portals and customer side API’s
3. Not all Altnet’s have used all the available data points that the TM Forum supports and have “cut down” more simple models more suited to Consumer type customers but not B2B complex provisioning features nor those necessary for bulk migrations – even though many of these Altnet’s are now suggesting their Wholesale services are fit for B2B operational models as well (Gap between OR Gold Standard and the Altnet implementation)

How we help

Acuity Insight  has Operational Experts who have implemented B2B and B2C scale operational models and can help the partners review their current models and readiness in this key development area.