Building the Telco Playbook: Connect, Delight, Beyond

Building the Telco Playbook: Connect, Delight, Beyond

Telcos are at a turning point. Revenues are flat, customer expectations are rising, and digital-native competitors are redefining connectivity. Competing on coverage and price is no longer enough.

The problem isn’t effort — many operators have launched apps and new offers — it’s outdated systems and slow processes that keep them from moving at digital speed.

The path forward is shifting from telco to techco: from utility provider to agile, product-led company. 

Circles captures this evolution in its Connect, Delight, and Beyond framework, guiding operators to modernize their core, redesign the customer experience, and expand into new services in a sequence that makes transformation both scalable and sustainable.

Understanding the Three Pillars

Transformation doesn’t happen all at once. It follows a sequence.

Telcos that attempt to launch flashy new products before fixing their core are building castles on sand. You can’t “delight” without a solid network foundation. You can’t scale “beyond” if your app crashes under traffic or takes minutes to load.

This is why the order matters:

• Connect builds the technical agility.
• Delight leverages that agility to earn loyalty.
• Beyond monetizes that loyalty into new services and ecosystems.

Connect: Core Network Redesign

Let’s be honest: many telcos are still held hostage by their own infrastructure.

Legacy OSS/BSS stacks, vendor-locked architectures, manual provisioning — all of it slows innovation to a crawl. 

A simple plan change or product launch might take weeks. That’s not sustainable in a world where nimble competitors ship updates overnight.

What the shift to a techco core looks like:

Attribute	Legacy Telco Core	Techco Core (Cloud-Native)
Infrastructure	Hardware-bound, inflexible	Virtualized, elastic, cloud-first
Time to Launch	Months	Days or hours
Integration	Custom-coded	API-first, composable
Operations	Manual, siloed	Automated, DevOps-enabled

Moving to a cloud-native core isn’t just about modern tech — it’s about gaining control.

When telcos control the stack, they control the roadmap. They can launch, test, iterate, and scale — without waiting on vendors or reinventing the wheel.

What Makes the Core Work

According to Circles’ work with operators globally, the most successful techcos tend to focus on four key actions:

• Disaggregate the Stack — Break down tightly coupled systems.
• Adopt Containerized Network Functions — Shift to CNFs orchestrated via Kubernetes.
• Expose Capabilities via APIs — Turn internal services into external enablers.
• Build an Internal Platform Team — Infrastructure becomes a product, not a cost center.

When the network becomes programmable, the business becomes agile. And agility is the currency of competitive advantage.

Delight: Customer-Centric Experiences

You’ve fixed the engine — now it’s time to design the experience.

This is where most telcos stumble. They launch apps with modern interfaces but dated processes behind them. You can’t mask a poor journey with a pretty design.

“Delight” is about making every interaction feel effortless, personal, and — dare we say — enjoyable. 

Circles defines telco transformation through the Connect, Delight, and Beyond framework — a practical playbook for becoming a techco. 

In this stage, the goal is to translate infrastructure agility into meaningful customer experiences that drive loyalty.

Common UX failures in telco today:

• Onboarding takes 5+ minutes and multiple steps
• Plan changes require support tickets
• Apps are cluttered and unintuitive
• Users get irrelevant or generic promotions

These aren’t minor annoyances. They’re growth killers.

Customers don’t leave because your prices are higher. They leave because it’s just too hard to get what they need.

What Good Looks Like

Delight-led telcos:

• Allow eSIM activation within 60 seconds
• Offer usage dashboards with contextual insights
• Send proactive alerts (e.g. “You’re using more data this week — want to upgrade?”)
• Enable support inside the app — not across five channels

The Metrics That Matter

Delight isn’t fluff. It moves numbers:

Metric	Impact from Delight
NPS (Net Promoter Score)	Improves with clarity, transparency, support
Churn	Drops with personalization & self-service
Conversion	Rises with frictionless onboarding
LTV (Lifetime Value)	Increases with upsell-ready UX

It’s not about building a beautiful app. It’s about building an intelligent, responsive journey that adapts to the customer — not the other way around.

Beyond: New Digital Services

Once you’ve earned loyalty, you earn the right to offer more.

This is the Beyond phase — where telcos become lifestyle platforms, not just utilities. Connectivity becomes the gateway to everyday digital services.

Think of it like this: if your users are logging into your app regularly, you’re sitting on prime real estate. So why just sell data?

Examples of Beyond services:

• Fintech: Mobile wallets, micro-loans, pay-later services
• Entertainment: Streamlined content bundles (e.g. Netflix, Spotify)
• Travel: In-app roaming control, travel SIMs, concierge tools
• Commerce: Curated product deals inside telco apps
• Health: Partner-led telehealth appointments, prescriptions

Telcos have the distribution. They have the billing relationship. And most importantly — they have trust.

The Platform Play

Techcos don’t try to build everything themselves. Instead, they turn their apps into ecosystems — via APIs and partnerships.

Capability	Techco Enabler
Fintech services	Embedded finance rails
Partner onboarding	Plug-and-play API layers
Data insights	Unified customer analytics
Microservices	Agile, modular architecture
Monetization	Revenue share & cross-sell

This turns the telco into a platform — where every customer interaction is a monetization opportunity.

How Telcos Become ‘Techcos’

Becoming a techco isn’t just a tech upgrade — it’s an operating model shift.

Yes, cloud-native cores and digital UX are essential, but true transformation means rethinking your role: from infrastructure provider to product- and platform-led business. That’s not evolution — it’s reinvention.

The best techcos don’t just launch apps or rebrand; they build a repeatable model rooted in:

• Speed over scale
• Autonomy over approval
• Learning over legacy
• Ecosystem over ego

Telco vs. Techco: What Changes

Category	Telco	Techco
Org Structure	Siloed departments	Cross-functional product squads
Tech Stack	Vendor-locked, hardware-bound	Cloud-native, API-first, modular
Decision-Making	Centralized, top-down	Decentralized, empowered teams
Product Development	Waterfall, long cycles	Agile, iterative, user-driven
Revenue Model	Connectivity (ARPU)	Ecosystem & experience (CLTV)
Talent Philosophy	Industry veterans	Tech-first, startup mindset

Conclusion

Telecom is no longer defined by infrastructure. Connectivity is expected; experience is the differentiator. Legacy models will fall behind, but techcos can unlock new growth.

The Connect, Delight, and Beyond framework shows the path: modernize the core for agility, turn that agility into loyalty, and extend loyalty into digital ecosystems.

This isn’t about another app or promotion — it’s about redefining what a telco is and how it creates value. Those that make the leap won’t just keep pace; they’ll set the standard for the future of connectivity.

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