MasterStream Blog

Top 4 CPQ Telecom Technologies Solving Provider Challenges

Written by Don Roots, VP of Sales, MasterStream ERP | Apr 22, 2021 6:55:57 PM

The growing pains brought on by digital transformation aren't endured just for the sake of putting businesses through unprecedented challenges. While the transition to these new solutions is often a gradual and sometimes difficult process, the end result of digital transformation provides benefits made possible only through modern solutions to long-standing configure, price, quote (CPQ) telecom problems.

This transformation is alleviating multiple pain points and limitations that have plagued telecom providers for years—and which have only gotten worse as telecom infrastructure has grown more complex. To keep pace with both the expectations of customers and the task of managing complexity around CPQ telecom services, new technologies are taking an algorithmic and rules-based approach that is necessary to build a sustainable telecom business model.

Here are four CPQ telecom technologies solving these pressing industry challenges.

1. Algorithmic CPQ Services

Manual CPQ telecom processes are time-consuming for both the customer and the provider. In many cases, this time and resource investment only lead to inefficient pricing and insufficient service packages.

Algorithmic CPQ services are a game-changer for sales agents and the telecom companies they serve, enabling fair pricing that is optimized for both close rates and profitability. At the same time, algorithmic solutions can ensure customers are quoted a tailored solution that meets their service requirements versus a generic service offering that only undermines adoption of digital transformation.

2. Aggregated Data Across All Sales Activities

From various lead referral sources to the public and private data sets used to evaluate telecom serviceability, modern telecom sales solutions aggregate disparate data streams to centralize all of your data in one place.

This improves a wide range of telecom provider challenges related to lead engagement, service packaging, and everything in between. Data aggregation clears the way to the following:

  • The ability to build comprehensive solutions in one step versus a multi-step process
  • Quoting intervals reduced to a few minutes versus hours, days, or weeks
  • Real-time assessment of third party supplier data integrated into your other products
  • Removal of elongated manual processes such as off-net evaluation

3. Data-Driven Availability Research Tools

Underpinning the CPQ process are important research processes that must be properly executed for the overall quote delivery to offer value for both the provider and the customer.

Manual serviceability research has traditionally been both labor-intensive and compromised by unreliable, incomplete, or out-of-date data that limits the accuracy of this important phase of research. Modern serviceability research tools address these limitations by combining public and private sets of data to improve data accuracy.

Thanks to algorithmic CPQ telecom solutions, automation can now be used to perform this research faster than ever before. This helps telecom businesses deliver a consistent, satisfying customer experience for each sales lead.

4. Automation of Administrative Corrupt Time

Whenever sales agents are dealing with proposals, paperwork, and other administrative tasks, they aren’t doing the thing they do best: selling. This administrative work has long been a necessary evil of running a successful sales department, but new telecom business solutions are taking this corrupt time out of sales professionals’ hands.

Through our platform-based automation of leads, quotes, proposals and order paperwork, sales teams can see their individual and collective corrupt time reduced by 90 percent—which creates more time for selling and minimizing lead response times. These gains in efficiency even extend to both internal and external communications, as well as related sales activities such as product management and cataloging, raising the ceiling for sales productivity.

When you turn your back on the innovative digital technologies disrupting the telecom industry, you’re only creating new CPQ telecom problems that your business will struggle to solve, even as competitors use these new technologies to overcome obstacles and capture new sales opportunities.

See for yourself how innovative telecom solutions can take your operations to the next level—contact us today to learn more.