Why Communications Industry needs Software Quality Assurance?

The communications sector has been going through various phases of growth, innovation, and disruption due to advancements in technology and changes in customer choices. Currently, the sector is observing some prominent challenges, but at the same time, is also looking at some great opportunities.

Technology being a key growth factor, there is a serious need to build a robust back-end IT system to support the technology move. The consumer scenario is equally dreadful, as proliferation of Over-the-top (OTT) companies and demand for innovative services has marginally cut down the profits for telecom operators. While services keep on coming up in the market, the communications industry is constantly struggling to provide the much-needed holistic experience to the consumers.

[Tweet “Can #Softwaretesting ensure growth for #telecommunications? #QualityAssurance”]

The communications industry is going through multiple challenges such as identifying new and better revenue streams, coping with declining margins, the need to keep on innovating, and most importantly ensuring availability of service all the time. Technology makes the industry grow, but there is a lot of effort and IT planning that goes into making this technology work for the market and the consumers.

From 2G and 3G services, today operators are offering 4G services and gearing up to provide 5G services as well. There are tremendous investments involved, and there is a critical need to ensure higher returns. Right from providing relevant services, assuring continuity of service, and giving the desired customer experience; telecom operators have to ensure quality assurance at every level.

The operators are facing a serious cut on the Average Revenue per User (ARPU), leading to an increase in operating costs and infrastructure costs. The industry is constantly trying to address the changing consumer preferences and shifting consumer behaviour for better packaging and delivery. There is constant innovation happening, which is leading to an increase in the usage of data services.

With growing digitization, the operators are even collaborating with other industries such as banking and retail to offer innovative services to the customers. However, these services cannot be successfully delivered unless the operator ensures a robust Quality of Service (QoS) and desired Quality of Experience (QoE) to the customer. More innovation implies added pressure for regular monitoring of the quality parameters. This is how they would be able to keep their business viable, as there is no scope for retrospective analysis.

Along these lines, operators will continue to develop new service lines to boost profitability and extend diverse services to the customers. This will lead to further expansion in areas such as Cloud, financial, and content services.

Key areas where Communications industry needs Software Quality Assurance

• Business Support

One of the most critical and demanding areas of the telecom industry is managing the network inventory, service provisioning, network configuration, and fault management. These are some important support management functions that enable the business to roll on-track. Operation Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) support the operation of end-to-end telecommunication services.

These systems are loaded with data and the right kind of output will ensure a smooth operation of processes. Software Quality Assurance effectively tests the operation of the systems and software for delivering the right output.

• Enhanced Output Quality

Telecom is a highly cost-intensive sector with massive investments in infrastructure, technology, and skillsets. Testing and Quality Assurance for the telecom sector helps to achieve business goals that are defined by output quality, optimized labour costs, efficiency of processes, and rapid industrialization. Hence, enabling the operators to meet their targeted profit figures.

• Enabling Business Innovation

Telecom sector has to constantly struggle to innovate and bring new and fresh services to the users. It is important to attract and retail customers to keep up the profit figures stay active in the highly competitive marketplace. Software Quality Assurance enables the sector to bring new products and services for the users, which includes mobile applications.

Moreover, they need to enter the market at lightning speed with their services, where Quality Assurance supports the process and helps to confidently deliver fresh services. Testing goes a long way to help operators in the big program rollout and guarantee utmost efficiency.

• Billing Support

Billing systems is a big challenge in the telecom sector, where there are complex billing systems that require high levels of integration across a range of application and technology stacks. Revenue assurance, dependability, availability and inter-operability are some key aspects in the billing processes for telecom operators. These are some of the key concerns that telecom companies are struggling with while applying their IT strategy across the OSS/BSS solutions.

Quality Assurance helps and gives the confidence to telecom operators to commit and take responsibility for delivering effective implementations. Billing is a revenue generation machine for telecom operators and any mess up on these lines can lead to inconvenience for the operators as well the consumers. Any disruption of services can be hazardous for an organization as the competition eyes every opportunity like a shark.

• Customer Retention and Delivering Customer Experience

Success of the telecom sector totally depends on how well you retain the customer, which is possible by delivering the service as desired. Customer retention can be achieved by establishing a robust backend software, customer-facing application that is user-friendly, is highly responsive, and has a strong IVR system.

Customer experience can extend beyond this, which can entail even basic service or any fresh product/service that the telecom operator has to offer. Any back-end software or application needs testing and has to ensure the desired experience.

In Conclusion

Research by Analysts at Technavio suggests that the global market for telecom power systems will grow at a CAGR of over 7% by 2020. The recent increase in the deployment of small cell power systems for LTE is a critical factor spurring this market’s growth prospects over the next few years.

Telecommunications is a high investment center, where infrastructure and technology is at the core of every deliverable. Software Testing and Quality Assurance empowers the telecommunications industry to offer their products and services with confidence and efficiency. Whether its network testing, application testing, or device testing, Quality Assurance is fundamental for sustaining in this highly competitive sector.

Cigniti is focused on helping the Communications industry tackle the aforementioned challenges and invests in, and supports innovations and research for the same. It offers a fully functional lab dedicated towards testing all sorts of network and bandwidth related needs of the industry. Our integration and advisory services help understand the real underlying needs of your organization, thereby assessing how best to overcome the persistent challenges.

Connect with us to establish a relevant QA and testing strategy for the communication’s domain.