Covid-19 And Telcos: From Business Continuity To Planning For The Future

Oliver Wyman has run a flash survey amongst its clients on March 18^th (read the results here) and again on March 27^th and received responses from over 25 operators from 24 different countries around the world. We will update the COVID-19 hub regularly to continue to share new findings on how the telco and other industries are overcoming the immediate COVID-challenges and how to deal with the aftermath.

We have seen a significant evolution of sentiment since our last report. Concerns are moving on from business continuity and crisis response, to what’s next.

Main findings are:

1. Business continuity has been mostly achieved: working-from-home at scale implemented almost overnight, networks holding up well, essential customer processes sustained, fast migration from high- to low-touch customer experience.
   
2. Operator concerns and areas of focus are moving on from basic business continuity:
   • Most are gearing up for a significantly longer lockup than expected two weeks ago (8-12 weeks)
   • Most have also begun to expect degraded business conditions and no return to normality for months
   • While a serious liquidity crunch is not expected, concerns are intensifying about cash collection, liquidity, and future revenues given exposure to sports rights, product downgrades, bankruptcies, bad debt, and other effects
   • Increasing sensitivity around client satisfaction, supporting clients through a rough patch and staying close to them
   • New focus emerging on employee wellbeing, morale, motivation, work-life balance and mental health, on top of the existing focus on workforce health and safety (and also on work from home productivity)
   • Growing attention to third party sustainability (vendors, outsourcers, distributors) and ability to reboot
3. Most operators are starting to think about what’s next and what the right approaches are around:
   • Digital transformation acceleration: Customer experience, workforce, culture
   • Commercial performance: churn, cross-sell, SAC/SRC (subscriber acquisition cost/ subscriber retention cost), B2B and B2C revenue opportunities and threats
   • Operating model back to basics, simplification, cost reduction and management of capital expenditure
   • Stepping up as an industry, vindicating telcos’ role, reshaping regulation and competition policy.

This is a living document. If you believe we are missing an insight, please reach out to the authors and we will update our findings live.