What do communications service providers (CSPs) want from their business support systems (BSS)?
Reliability and security go without saying — but that’s something their legacy BSS stacks already provide. Embarking early into digital transformation and enabling it for other industries, telcos have been left saddled with old software stacks that are notoriously difficult to scale, update, and maintain. While they were entangled in the increasing complexity of their patchwork software, heavily investing in new generations of networks, over-the-top media services (OTT) providers swept in with their elegantly architectured programs and took a sizeable portion of the communications market. Additionally, OTT players set high standards for digital customer experience.
Playing catch-up, telcos realized they needed customer-centricity to compete for the digital-savvy consumer. They also required agility to shorten time-to-market for new offerings, diversify their revenue streams, and be able to try and fail fast. Many CSPs likely wished they could just start over.
LotusFlare DNO™ Cloud was conceived as the agile, wieldy BSS telcos would want if they had a clean technological slate to start from scratch. Instead of being developed out of old monolithic systems, DNO Cloud was designed from the customer experience down — to enable a consistent and delightful digital experience no matter the complexity.
LotusFlare’s dedication to delivering simple and customer-focused solutions resulted in Experience Services, an API layer that enhances user interactions.
APIs: Experience and Domain
To explain the role of API experience layers, we need to go back to basics — micro-level basics, as it were. Today’s software architectures are usually based on microservices. Applications are composed of small, independent services that communicate with each other to function as a whole. Each microservice focuses on a specific business capability and can be developed, deployed, and scaled independently of other services.
Loosely coupled, microservices eliminate heavy dependencies of older systems that meant a simple update or one service failure brought down the whole system. Now development happens faster and services scale separately.
Microservices and APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) are closely related in modern software architecture, as APIs are the primary means through which microservices communicate with each other and with external systems.
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One of the ways to classify APIs is into:
- APIs related to the way a business works (Domain APIs).
- APIs related to the way a customer interacts with the business (Experience APIs).
Domain APIs provide business capability. For example, LotusFlare DNO Cloud Domain Services include Party Management, Account Management, and Identity Management. These atomic services expose TM Forum-conformant Domain APIs, managing relevant domain information and business logic.
On the other hand, Experience APIs are designed to facilitate different customer journeys by connecting back-end systems, services, and data sources. Packed up in a layer, they serve as the glue that allows the front and back end to interact.
Key Characteristics of Experience APIs:
1. Customer-Centric: Experience APIs are tailored to meet the needs of different user interfaces or channels, such as mobile apps, websites, or other front-end applications like customer agent or partner portals. They are optimized for delivering the right data in the right format to enhance the user experience.
2. Orchestration and Aggregation: These APIs often aggregate data from multiple sources, including Domain APIs, to provide a cohesive and contextually relevant response to the customer. For example, an Experience API might combine customer profile data, billing history, and product information to personalize a shopping experience.
3. Flexibility and Agility: By abstracting the back-end complexity, Experience APIs allow front-end developers to create and update customer experiences faster This layer decouples the front end from back-end systems, enabling more agile development and iteration.
4. Consistency Across Channels: Experience APIs ensure that the customer experience is consistent across different channels and devices. Whether a customer accesses a service via a mobile app, website, or other platform, the Experience API delivers a uniform experience by providing the same underlying data and logic.
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LotusFlare Experience Services
LotusFlare DNO Cloud, a cloud-native BSS that simplifies technology and experience, contains an experience layer and a domain layer out of the box.
The experience layer, or Experience Services, is a layer of Experience APIs that contain complex or custom logic. These APIs may be unique to specific clients or reusable across different clients.
So what does this mean for telcos and their customers?
For the customer, it means a smooth digital experience across channels. If you want to check out your account details or browse the product catalog, the experience layer integrates all the data into a single user-friendly interface for self-service apps.
What’s more important, it does this fast. For example, if a certain action requires three calls to the Domain services, without the experience layer, all front-end channels will perform the same three calls and the same logic over and over again. With the experience layer, one call is enough because it orchestrates and synchronizes data across multiple Domain services. The API experience layer effectively hides the underlying complexity from the customer.
And not only from the customer but from other end-users as well. LotusFlare Experience Services allow for easy front-end channel integration requiring little or no coding from internal or external developers increasing operational and cost efficiency. Partner portals are also simple to hook onto the experience layer, while customer agents get an integrated, aggregated overview of customer data for their customer management systems.
Finally, an API experience layer is a far-sighted addition to your BSS. Designed for scale and flexibility, it allows you to add new front-end channels or new services to the domain layer without changing the experience layer.
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Conclusion
Sitting between the Domain services and your front ends, the experience layer cuts through the complexities of the domain layer and efficiently serves up a simplified digital experience to the user across all channels.
Within DNO Cloud, this layer is called “Experience Services” and comes out of the box. Apart from enabling easy integrations for CSP front ends, Experience Services orchestrates tasks and aggregates data from different services so that front-end and back-end communication is efficient and friction-free.
