2023 Predictions Accelerating Growth for Service Providers

So what 2023 predictions will enable communication service providers (CSPs) to accelerate growth and easily generate new sources of income? If you are the Chief Information Officer (CIO) or Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a telecom operator, you know that keeping up with evolving trends in the digital ecosystem is pivotal. You’re always on the lookout for short-term wins and long-term, sustainable, and impactful optimizations.

While the telecommunications industry has made significant progress in augmenting infrastructures to keep pace with digitization, you may be struggling against the onslaught of priorities in an increasingly dynamic technological and competitive landscape.

We looked at the trends in telecom over the past few years to give service providers the top 2023 predictions and driving factors of the future of the telecom industry and investment areas that should form the basis of revenue growth and cost optimization priorities for CSPs.

Cloud isn’t just the best path to speed-to-market, high-margins, and accelerated growth, businesses are looking to their service providers for modern, mobile communication solution.

As we forecasted in 2021, 2022 saw the continued growth in the use of desktop and softphone applications — and this upcoming year will be no exception. COVID has only accelerated the adoption. UCaaS continues to grow across all market segments as enterprises opt to host less hardware on-premises in favor of flexible, cost-effective, and UCaaS solutions.

In a tenured market like telecom, there is market share for the taking when it comes to mobile applications and UCaaS. ISPs, MSPs, and cable, satellite, and fiber providers seamlessly expand their product suite through a cloud-native platform simply by leveraging it for their own use.

• 75% of enterprise users will not use a desk phone, up from 30% in 2020.
• By 2024, downloads will reach 183.7 billion, up 9% from the earlier forecast that came out before COVID-19 that had initially accounted for 7 billion fewer installs.
• By 2024, mobile games will account for 41% of new installs, or 74.8 billion.

• From 2019 through 2025, the deployment of cloud telephony will more than double, from about 20% of overall telephony users to 50%.
• 32% increase in mobile internet users, from 3.8 billion in 2019 to 5.0 billion in 2025.
• Smartphone usage will increase from 65% of the total number of subscribers in 2019 to 80% in 2025, globally.

At their core, contact center solutions are complex customer experience facilitators. It’s not enough to supply outstanding software that works seamlessly. Contact center solutions needs to be modular, data-driven, offer robust agent functionality, and be relentlessly customer focused.

So, what are end-customers expecting from their service providers in 2023 and beyond? Based on the trends in telecom over the past few years, accelerated by COVID-19, CSPs can anticipate needing to rapidly meet the following demands with a contact center solution (and there is countless proof).

On-premises offerings have no hopes of keeping pace with the demand for a fast, ever evolving, and positive online experience. Studies show that when a customer’s problem is resolved on the first call, only 1% are likely to try a competitor, compared to 15% when the problem is not sufficiently addressed.

So how do you achieve the coveted one-stop shop? You empower agents with a powerful contact center solution with multimedia queues for voice, email, social media, SMS, and web chat, so agents can communicate with other agents and customers in whatever way best suits the situation.

The employee experience (EX) has become just as critical as the customer experience (CX), with the Great Resignation and Great Reprioritization only accelerating this trend. In fact, of 1,000 workers polled, 39% said they’d consider quitting if their employers didn’t give them the flexibility to work from home.

A state-of-the-art contact center offers functionality that supports employees both personally and professionally, empowering them with the vital capabilities needed for agents to meet, and exceed, workplace, and customer expectations.

Businesses grow. Businesses shrink. And so do their needs. Unlike an on-premises model, where the technology investment is a sunk cost that the company incurs regardless of how often it is used, cloud technology costs scale with customer needs, which means your growth and margins are in sync.

Business continuality is table stakes for serving customers. Contact centers with excessive downtime cannot addressed customer needs in a timely manner, which inevitably frustrates customers and pushes them to competitors. 73% of contact centers cite increasing uptime (through redundant carrier integration available through cloud contact center providers) as the second top reason driving their investment in cloud technology.

Cloud-based call centers with 500 seats report saving an average of 43%. These solutions eliminate costly capital expenditures (CAPEX) and transition costs to more manageable and predictable operational expenses (OPEX).

As 2023 looms, what is your organization focusing on? The upcoming years are a unique opportunity for communication service providers (CSPs) to fundamentally reimagine their business or, alternatively, risk another decade of decline.

Perhaps your business needs to reduce costs, expand revenue opportunities, or improve margins. Is this the time for a pivot — to reinvent your business model? Some CSPs may even need to do all of these at once.