MTN South Africa has announced a multi-year extension to its relationship with CSG. In the next phase of their digital journey, CSG will help MTN migrate its enterprise and consumer customers to a new end-state systems architecture. CSG has already delivered key benefits to MTN that include streamlining its processes from billing through to its retail store, as well as helping MTN monetise and manage new services and partnerships.
“Continuous investment in advanced technology is critical to MTN delivering a superior customer experience, while providing the agility needed to foster growth and innovation in today’s digital economy,” commented Phinda Ncala, Executive: Information Technology, MTN South Africa. “As our trusted technology provider for well over a decade, we work with CSG to help lead our digital evolution and accelerate our journey to becoming a fully digitalised operator.”
Omnisperience’s View
Long-standing relationships like the one between MTN South Africa and CSG are always a positive sign of a company’s stability and commitment to its customer base. But hidden in the detail of this announcement are a few interesting points. The first is that CSG is as relevant in a growth market such as South Africa as it is to its core customers in the US. The second is its heritage and knowledge of wholesale, B2B and B2C customers places it amongst the relatively modest number of BSS vendors that are well positioned to support the hybrid B2B-B2C space and the consumerisation of B2B experiences.
CSG’s other strong differentiator is that its cable origins mean it is well versed in supporting the content part of the quad play model. As more consumers in Africa acquire smart phones this provides opportunities for it to support its customers in providing affordable access to content, which is all about the billing, charging, business model and ability to sell content. (See also StarNews and MTN bring Black & Sexy TV to Africa)