Customers expect to engage with their service provider over the digital channel of their choice. I expect the Touchpoints to increase dramatically over the next 18 to 24 months, which means there will be a wider set of digital Touchpoints front ending customer journeys.

It will be too expensive and time-consuming to support and modify each digital touchpoint if it becomes its own stack. One set of supportable optimised customer journeys fitting the TMForum customer lifecycle to support all digital touchpoints is required. But as each touchpoint supports different UI/UX features and functions, how can this be enabled?

A perfect example is a customer’s intent - what is it that a customer intends to ask you, buy from you or request from you? When using an app, it’s not an issue. The app has buttons that have a defined function or capability and if the app is well designed, that function should be self-evident. If your touchpoint uses voice or natural language input such as Google Assistant, then you need to ascertain what the customer would like to achieve - their ‘intent’. There are many software components available that will attempt to capture the intent, but that’s all they do. Once they have captured the intent of the customer engagement, they are unable to do anything with it.

What is valuable to a CSP is the ability to execute on the intent. What this requires is a set of customer journeys containing business logic that accesses, processes, and displays information pertaining to each journey. These journeys must be channel-agnostic and therefore consistent no matter which channel the customer engages through. The best way to achieve this is through a Headless architecture, which isolates the channel-specific logic from the common journey logic. This provides a transformational, powerful, and engaging customer experience.