Introduction
In recent years, with the continuous development of the Internet in recent years, with the continuous development of the Internet, companies are actively introducing enterprise digital plans to expand or build digital functions and expect to improve business efficiency or revenue growth. With the emergence of successful digital transformation stories, this trend is heating up.
According to the related statistics, there are 40% of corporate technology spending has been used for digital transformation, and by 2019, corporate spending will exceed $2 trillion. However, opportunities and risks both exist. In the process of digital transformation, not all companies create their own digital business model to raise profit and promote service. There are many businesses have failed in the digital transformation, despite their success in the physical industry. Therefore, it should have special digital business models which could be appropriate to a different business.
In the communication area, Sprint can be used as a successful case to illustrate how the digital business model contributes to success. Most enterprises believe that using digital business model can decrease cost helping them to obtain more profit. There is no doubt that a digital transformation can help a company to reduce the cost, but how to use it to obtain a longer-term, better customer experience is more important for a company, which is said by the president of Sprint. Their unique digital business model helps them to improve customer experience, at the same time, increase market revenue.
Sprint—— a successful case on digital transformation
Sprint is a global communications company and it is also one of the top three U.S. carriers. It mainly provides long-distance communication, local service and mobile communication service, and provides comprehensive and multi-level wired and wireless communication service to bring consumers, merchants and governments sufficient mobile performance.
As a company in the communication industry, it is significant for the sprint to provide an excellent customer experience, so the aim of digital transformation for Sprint is how to use digital tools to analyze data which helps to improve the customer experience.
What the Sprint does to implement its digital business model, it mainly focuses on two different parts. One of them is to improve technology. To be more specific, it refers to build the company’s data architecture. By analyzing the quantity of data, it is more likely to satisfy customers’ requirement. Another field of digital transformation of the Sprint is on the internal structure which refers to set up digital marketing and product management system. It may strengthen the internal control which promotes the development of the enterprise.
As for the digital investment on technology, Sprint uses digital software to process the big data generated by logs, databases, emails and other sources to evaluate the performance of Sprint.com (Abramovich, 2018). The data help IT staff to determine which glitches are hindering Sprint’s ability to facilitate transactions, from basic browsing to phone purchases to upgrades consumers are trying to complete online. By analyzing the errors and other delays also helps Sprint to determine when and why customers are dropping deals. It is important for enterprises to know the information in transactions which could be a warning for enterprises.
Sprint also creates a data lake based on Hadoop to analyze customer data to improve the way of recommending products to consumers. The enterprise tries to summarize and analyze data from different customers’ browsing information, search results ,and other parties. After that, it recommends products to consumers according to their needs and preferences according to the results of data analysis. For example, users of Android phones for up to 10 years will receive Android phone discounts. This is about building a project about you and your relationship with us (Abramovich, 2018). Understand the needs of consumers and then provide consumers with better services. Sprint’s digital transformation applies across different aspects with the IT organization and digital technology in the middle of each project.
Besides that, Sprint also begins to strengthen its digital marketing team. They create the first in-house digital marketing agency, through using digital and programmatic managing to meet the company’s marketing needs (Matthews, 2017). In this way, it could own and control their own marketing data which may ensure more real-time decisions and guarantee that the company’s spending is highly optimized. Furthermore, Sprint also uses artificial intelligence and machines to manage products. It tries to make the product management team to be more data-driven (Matthews, 2017). For example, the Spring uses digital tools to know product inventory or after sales quality maintenance situation of products. Last but not least, Sprint’s digital transformation also has taken into account optimization of processes, it applies digital touch points to make no matter internal or external process more streamlined resulting to provide a more effective service to customers.
Conclusion
From the above-mentioned discussion, we can know that a digital business model has contributed to the success of the Sprint. In the future, Sprint will continue to focus on building digital channels and creating online experiences that allow customers to help themselves (Abramovich, 2018). However, as I mentioned before, not all business is successful in the digital model. Each enterprise has its own economic situations. It should create a unique digital business model rather than learn from others. Despite utilizing a digital business model is a trend now, it still needs to think about if it is worth for business.
References:
1.Giselle Abramovich (2018)Inside Sprint’s Digital Transformation Journey.https://www.cmo.com/features/articles/2018/1/25/inside-sprints-digital-transformation-journey.html#gs.BbWqmoZJ
2. Kayla Matthews (2017) Sprint streamlines digital marketing business with new in-house agenc.https://www.marketingdive.com/news/sprint-streamlines-digital-marketing-business-with-new-in-house-agency/504582/
3. Vikrant Gandhi (2017). The 2017 Sprint Business Analyst Day: Update on Sprint’s Strategy and Roadmap. http://digitaltransformation.frost.com/expert-insights/viewpoints/2017-sprint-business-analyst-day-update-sprints-strategy-and-roadmap/
Tong's digital business blog 
Dear Tong
Thank you for the article about Sprint！Through your article, I learned that Sprint has made various efforts in the digital business model. First, it uses digital tools to analyze data and build digital marketing and product management systems while trying to meet customer needs. At the same time, it uses digital technology to process logs, and the database generates big data to evaluate its performance. Finally, it better serves its customers through big data screening, including recommending the products they are most interested in.
As far as I know, Sprint has recently made some new progress in digitization, that is, the Curiosity IoT platform. The platform will be commercially available by the end of 2018. Curiosity IoT consists of two main components: the core (IoT network) and the OS (operating system). Sprint chose Ericsson as its strategic partner. Curiosity IoT challenges tradition because it is not limited to traditional infrastructure and builds a distributed computing architecture from scratch. This new architecture is amazing! It virtually virtualizes the network functions of the entire network, providing customers with more intelligence and computing power closer to the edge and where the data is generated. I found some information about this platform on the official website of sprint (https://business.sprint.com/curiosity-iot/). I hope that you have time to read and welcome us to have a chance to conduct more in-depth discussions! For example, will there be some negative external influences while using the data model?
Best wishes
Caroline
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Dear Caroline
Thanks for your comment. I am happy to have a discussion with you about the digitalization in Sprint. And I will look at that website carefully, it may get some new points of Sprint. As for some negative influence in using the data model, I think the high cost may be one of the problems. Generally, there is a big investment in the data model, Sprint also faces this problem, so maybe it can be a negative external influence while using the data model. Hope that answers your question.
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Hi Tong, thanks for your nice blog.I have recently browsed some news for the merger of the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. It would reduce the number of national wireless carriers from four to three. Since the merger was announced, some have argued that it will lead to harmful repercussions for consumers such as higher prices, fewer choices, and less flexibility in switching carriers. For example, both T-Mobile and Sprint consistently offer competitive products that have exerted pressure on AT&T and Verizon to offer more consumer-friendly data plans and eliminate restrictive long-term contracts. In your opinion, how can sprint use its own digital technology advantages to solve this problem?
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Hi Meiting, firstly thanks for your comments. After your reminding, I have looked up the relevant information about the merger. Yes, like you said there is some bad voice on this merger, but I don’t think it has many relationships with the merger. In my opinion, competition always exists in national wireless carriers no matter three or four, as a result, it will bring some bad effect to customers. On the contrary, the merger will promote the development of a 5G network and may bring more benefits to consumers. Hope that answers your question.
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Thank you for the great blog which made me understand what it happens to me when I do shop online.
According to my personal experience of online shopping, it happens very offend which the website sends me an e-mail when I didn’t finish my order during the day that I visited its website. Furthermore, during the time while I was searching or selecting the items, it always shows me a similar item which maybe I would like it. Sometimes I was questioning why the website is so smart and acting like it can read my mind.
Right now, all my question was answered by your blog, this is because Sprint uses Big data to generates all the detail like a database, e-mail, log to analyses the data of customer experience which really help them to improve the customer satisfaction. Another thing is it uses artificial intelligence: AI to manage the inventory product which effective to the customer can make the decision at the real-time when It shows how many of that item remain in stock
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Thanks for your comments.
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