Boosting customer experience

For global enterprises, modern business is a 24/7 opportunity and challenge to serve customers better.

They are constantly looking for ways to enhance the customer experience to provide value-added, margin-rich services and support their customers’ evolving service expectations.

But globalisation is posing a significant challenge to boosting customer service as greater competition across borders and interdependent economies raise operational costs and strain profitability.

Increasingly, reliable connectivity has become a critical to improving customer service levels. Without robust, worldwide network connectivity across its global WAN architecture, enterprises can’t deliver optimal user experiences on the site. Slow, inconsistent access with high latency will severely hamper efforts to enhance customer satisfaction.

Other customer service areas that require attention include;

- Improving cloud-based application response times to meet customer requests. Cloud-based applications frequently backhaul network traffic through the data center which can result in slow service.

- Limited or unreliable bandwidth can impact remote users and customers because it takes too long to complete transactions. 

- Lacking flexibility to launch or provision network resources to support new business as they occur.     

- Unable to secure connections with customers to ensure data protection and privacy, especially in payment systems.

To deliver a superior customer experience and compete internationally, the enterprise WAN architecture needs to be more responsive, more rapidly as companies move more applications into public and private cloud services to serve customers locally. This is not always possible due to local infrastructure limitations.

Many companies turn to global network service providers to address this problem, but the need for local hosting—or geo-based server load balancing—can be quite high in many international markets, especially in Asia. To boost customer service, a geo-load balanced server via a regional service provider is often the superior option. Such a network connectivity setup will improve domestic website access speeds and reliability when serving relevant content to domestic markets.

According to a Gartner report (How to Choose the Right Level of Agility for Your Next Global Enterprise WAN, March 2018), identifying the right WAN architecture that would offer acceptable flexibility to meet global business needs in the face of changing customer expectations is a serious challenge.

The report recommends enterprises adopt a managed hybrid-WAN (using both Internet and Multiprotocol Label Switching) to improve agility by structuring their global WAN into multi-regional WANs. Gartner expects more than 70% of global enterprise WANs will adopt a hybrid WAN architecture, up from 50% currently.

Improving WAN agility

Dividing global WANs into multiple regional WANs will enhance the network agility; they can be sourced and managed independently of each other. This creates a WAN architecture that offers the global enterprises more choice and flexibility to use regional and global service providers and to deliver faster site rollouts. Incorporating more regional service providers can drive down MPLS WAN costs by as much as 40%, according to researchers.

Lower management overhead

A hybrid WAN architecture across a regional WAN offers flexible cloud connectivity for public and private cloud services. Most regional service providers offer a managed hybrid WAN service based on their own dedicated Internet access and preferred partners to optimise costs and improve provisioning times.

Business-grade internet for faster site rollouts

Sourcing business-grade Internet access from regional service providers will avoid excessive management overhead and deliver a homogenous, end-to-end performance experience. Regional service providers typically offer advanced Internet backbones to deliver business-grade Internet access for business-critical and interactive applications.

Greater WAN flexibility with Communication Hubs

Enterprises seeking to expand into new countries, branch offices, cloud services and other external connectivity should consider a communication-hub based WAN approach. Communication hubs interconnect to create a core WAN network that can connect multi-regional WANs to support application traffic moving among regions, and the use of multi-clouds to deliver customer services. This approach is easier to manage where flexibility is a priority.

A global service provider offers a compelling way to get enterprise applications to market, but each region has its own unique set of technical and regulatory hurdles to overcome. Often, a regional provider is the best way to confront these challenges while achieving comparable performance benefits and cost savings.

A hybrid WAN architecture offers the best mix of agility and cost optimisation to respond to a dynamic business environment and changing customer service expectations. It’s important to find the right mix of service providers but whatever mix you end up with, the result should always boost customer service levels with increased reach, presence, and performance that will help your business succeed in any market.

As the leading RSP in Asia, Singtel¹ offers the largest IPVPN network−more than 70 global partnerships with local operators across APAC and an ecosystem of more than 30 local ISPs for domestic reach−to connect businesses across the most remote cities.

A one-stop ICT managed services provider², Singtel create the best mix for companies expanding into Asia by simplifying and unifying all your communications with advanced network solutions and extensive expertise.

For more information, please contact us here.

¹Singtel is the Market Leader in the 2018 IDC MarketScape: Asia/Pacific Next-Generation Telcos: Telecom Services 2018 Vendor Assessment

²Frost & Sullivan ICT Awards - Asia-Pacific Telecom Group 2018 . The award recognises Singtel’s performance and market leadership in Asia Pacific