Self-Service Access
Thanks for continuing to read our series on how network providers will innovate in 2022 to bring new capabilities to customers. We’ve already covered network expansion and network-as-a-service capabilities in two earlier posts.
In this post, we’re going to explore another critical set of capabilities customers demand: the need for cloud-like self-service provisioning.
Obviously simple is better than complicated. Though telecommunications has traditionally been a complex business full of manual intervention, where providers can, they’ll give customers more direct control than ever before. The idea stems from the cloud experience, which gives customers a direct dashboard of provisioning, configuration, orchestration, command, and diagnostic features.
Inspired by this, fiber network providers are making efforts to improve the customer experience through hands-on, simplified experiences in 2022. The idea is to make network provisioning as easy as cloud provisioning, though there will still be manual intervention done for some services.
Here’s how network providers plan to roll this out:
1. We’ll see the launch and improvement of customer portals and dashboards
This will give customers a better way to organize, procure, and manage their fiber networking in a single portal contributing to better agility, utilization, and cost controls. Organizations should expect a large set of capabilities in their customer portals, including:
- Placing orders
- Identifying problems by service and/or location
- View details of services: understanding utilization or performance much more quickly than before
- Setting alerts for utilization and performance
- Better handling of repair tickets and scheduled maintenance
- Conduct utilization analysis over time
- Improved abilities to plan for circuit upgrades, configuration changes, and scaling.
2. We’ll also see more and more product bundles
As cloud providers already know, organizations often purchase a set of related services together. As they’ve learned which sets are most common, cloud providers offer bundles at a discounted price. Network providers will do more of this, enabling services on every port but not billing for them until the customer chooses a bundle. This approach cuts down on provider-side manual intervention and accelerates time to value for customers.
3. API Integrations…
…will be another key area of opportunity for network providers to deliver a differentiated, outcome-driven service. As we discussed in our second post, making the network more programmatic is a key part of supporting organizational agility and consistency. Whether you’re building on existing APIs for quoting and ordering or making plans to leverage emerging APIs for cross-connection and service delivery, provider efforts to build and enhance APIs will make a difference as organizations seek to treat fiber infrastructure as code.
All the fiber providers will push in these areas, bringing innovation after innovation to market, and Zayo is no exception. Whether you’re leveraging our Tranzact customer portal, taking advantage of our discounted bundles, or building on the robust features of our APIs, we’re here to power your success and will continue to do more as we continue to grow and innovate in 2022.
In the next post, we’ll be talking about the edge, and whether network providers fit in. Stay tuned!