'Going Green' - Why Telecoms Operators are Pursuing a More Environmentally Friendly Agenda
by Dominic Smith, marketing director, Cerillion Technologies
In line with the current emphasis on conserving resources, reducing wastage and cutting carbon emissions, telecommunications services are at the forefront of a revolution in green thinking, which is affecting every business sector today. And telecoms operators themselves are under ever-greater pressure to adopt environmentally friendly strategies.
Telcos have long been pioneers in helping businesses from other industries pursue a green agenda. The deployment of robust global wide area networks and connectivity for video-conferencing applications, for example, have both played an important role in reducing the need for business travel and unnecessary face-to-face meetings.
However, operators increasingly need to see the provision of tools to help other businesses become greener as just one element of their overall environmental strategy. Today, they need to be focused on making a more direct contribution towards the future well-being of the planet.
How Electronic Billing Helps Conserve Resources
Telecoms operators have already made a start in the direction of greater environmental responsibility, with several key initiatives already well advanced. One of the most significant is the work they are doing to promote electronic billing. In the past, potential cost savings were the major incentive for operators and end customers alike.
And electronic billing does offer clear business benefits being comparatively inexpensive both for the operator and the end customer. In contrast, hard-copy itemised bills typically entail significant print costs and wastage of resources.
Yet, despite operators actively pushing the benefits of electronic billing, customer take-up has been slow in general. One of the likely reasons is that the environmental benefits of the service have until recently not been highlighted by operators.
BT recently began to ‘push' a green angle to electronic billing by encouraging its major customers to convert to its OneBill service in preference to hard-copy paper invoices. Further underlining its green credentials, BT's efforts to convert customers to paper-free billing have resulted in more than 500,000 trees being planted in the UK so far.
The landmark has been achieved thanks to BT's partnership with the Woodland Trust, which guarantees that every time a customer signs up for paper-free billing, BT pays for a native broadleaf sapling to be planted in a UK woodland creation site.
BT's approach is just one sign that, in the future, telcos are likely to give the issue of ‘green billing' a higher priority. Indeed, most operators today are actively looking at ways in which they are selling the service. With the public better informed about environmental issues than ever, the ‘green' approach is likely to have great resonance with customers in the future.
Going forward, software providers will increasingly join forces with their telco customers to promote the reductions in environmental waste and operational cost that can potentially be achieved by pursuing this methodology. Over time, greater numbers of businesses are likely to elect to become part of what has been described as ‘the paperless electronic billing and payment manifesto.'
Operators often see electronic billing as just one element of a larger integrated self-service strategy. The concept of self-care for customers is in itself an environmentally friendly one.
Customers can be encouraged to carry out key tasks easily themselves online such as updating personal details or ordering new services without drawing too heavily on the resources of the operator, either in terms of systems or of people. Self-care typically results in reduced customer dependency on large call centres, and, by association, radically reduces the amount of physical equipment required to service customers.
Pre-integration and the Managed Service Model
Operators can also make a more direct contribution towards protecting the environment through the systems model they choose to implement. Opting for a pre-integrated set of components when updating billing and CRM systems or IT systems architectures, is a good initial step.
Adopting such an approach enables operators to significantly reduce the time projects take, together with the amount of travel undertaken and resource usage required, especially when compared with the traditional best-of-breed approach, which can involve large integration teams visiting the operator's site every day for months on end.
Operators can take the benefits achieved from pre-integration one step further by choosing to follow a managed service model, thereby reducing the expense of integration teams flying to different locations to install and maintain new systems. Instead, existing infrastructure at existing managed service centres and existing hardware and software can be used - a more environmentally sustainable approach.
The benefits achieved will tend to accrue over time with the cumulative efficiencies of re-use. Once an operator has commissioned a service partner to put in place the relevant people, hardware and infrastructure in one of these centres, there is no need to re-invest every time the centre is used. And of course the wide area network connectivity provided by operators enables them to achieve all the benefits associated with hosting services in distant locations and managing them remotely.
In the complete managed and hosted model, this is taken one stage further still, with the management of the system typically carried out by a third party from a remote location. The managed service approach does of course reduce, if not completely eliminate, the need for teams of consultants to travel to and from site.
Looking into the Green Future
Those telecoms operators, like BT for example, that have already deployed electronic billing and online self-service capabilities for their customers are likely to promote these areas much more in the future. And those who haven't already deployed this functionality are likely to begin doing so very soon. Perhaps they also need to look at how they provide those services and then they should really also consider the benefits of both the pre-integrated solution and the managed service approach.
Renewable energy providers are often able to sell their services at a premium because they are selling to the ‘green aware consumer'. In the age of telecoms commoditisation, one way operators can justify maintaining their prices is through investment in green initiatives and having green systems in place. Maybe, in the future, they may even have a legitimate argument for charging a premium when selling electronic billing and self-care to a green audience?
Another possibility is the emergence of niche operators focused entirely on targeting the green consumer. In recent years, the market has seen the arrival of virtual operators who target specific industry segments, encompassing everything from students to sports enthusiasts and from children to coffee-shop users.
Maybe we are not far away from seeing the first telecoms reseller, which sets up, brands and positions its products purely in the green segment and exclusively targets the green consumer? With the growing business focus on environmental protection, this is likely to become a reality sooner rather than later.
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