Serving the underserved
ATN International is on a mission to connect underserved and remote communities with fast, reliable internet and communication services. Founded in 1987, it has 12 operating companies employing 2,500 people.
In 2021, the company acquired Alaska Communications (ACS) and with it the opportunity to bring fibre broadband to homes in the region. “We have more than 35 years’ experience connecting people in challenging, rural landscapes, so we knew we could help communities in Anchorage and Fairbanks to thrive”, says Nitin Chopra, Chief Customer Experience Officer at ATN.
As the most northern of America’s states, Alaska can be a challenging environment to operate in. Its cold climate means there are only three or four months a year when it’s possible to lay fibre. This put greater pressure on the company to get its new service up and running quickly and efficiently.
Launching home broadband in Alaska
As digital dependency grows, more and more homes rely on having access to fast, reliable broadband for work, healthcare, socialising and entertainment. And the customer experience doesn’t start when they connect their devices, it begins from the moment they sign up on the website. To make this experience seamless from the get-go, ACS needed to build out the tech stack that made ordering its home broadband services quick and easy, integrating this process with billing, first-line customer support and field operations systems to create a single, smooth workflow.
“Our vision was for an end-to-end digital experience, eliminating manual order-to-install processes and using the project as a blueprint that we could roll out to other operating companies”, explains Darren Conn, Director of Service Management at ATN.
This approach was designed to reduce errors when processing orders by email and mitigate high fallout rates—where orders are mistakenly accepted for areas that the company doesn’t serve. This will also significantly speed up the order fulfilment process, improving both the customer and employee experience and enabling self-service.
ATN had been using ServiceNow solutions for six years, and was impressed by its open architecture, ease of integration and great out-of-the-box functionality. When it learnt of the ServiceNow purpose-built solutions for the telecommunications industry—specifically Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications (SOMT) and Telecommunications Service Management (TSM)—it was the perfect pairing for the project.
“We have a great relationship with ServiceNow. The Telecom products work really well for our industry, so we were excited to see solutions specially tailored for our business”, said Darren.
A team of 75 to 100 field and business consultants worked alongside system integrator MouriTech for eight weeks to implement the solutions. ServiceNow provided training sessions and Nitin recalls that a remote, multinational team working on the project across time zones allowed work to accelerate at a higher pace to project delivery.
To streamline connecting other platforms such as Salesforce and Oracle, the team used Integration Hub, praising the out-of-the-box spokes that made it quick and painless. ACS connected its CRM, service delivery, and field service applications to support its engineering teams. It also integrated the billing platform, ERP system, and custom apps the team had built in-house.
“Integration hub is one of the key technologies we leverage in our ecosystem. The ‘plug and play’ aspect of ServiceNow makes it really easy to pull functionality into our tech stack”, said Darren.
Digitising the order management process
Every day, customer service and fulfilment teams at ACS are using SOMT to automate order fulfilment processes and get broadband switched on easier and faster for customers. This includes approximately 1,000 pre-orders that were captured in spreadsheets and pushed into the solution when it went live.
To start, customers can check whether their address is eligible for the service on the ACS website, which reduces calls to customer service by 20 to 30%. If eligible, the customer can immediately order their broadband services themselves online.
“When an order comes into SOMT, the solution breaks it down into steps and automates tasks such as provisioning and checking to see if the order form is complete”, says Nitin. “It then automatically assigns tasks to the right people”.
What once could take several hours to complete and was fraught with human error, SOMT helps reduce costs while delivering seamless experiences to ACS’ order fulfilment processes, significantly reducing fallout and human error. In some cases, it has seen orders processed in less than one minute.
“ServiceNow is lightning fast. If we don’t need a technician to go and set anything up at the customer’s home, we literally can connect the service on the same day, a pace we have never experienced before”, adds Darren.
Connecting support teams
Getting broadband services switched on faster and more efficiently was only half of the customer experience equation. For ACS, its customer service team needed to be empowered to handle service requests more quickly and consistently.
TSM provides the operational layer when orders are completed and the customer needs to reach out for support. The first-line support system is integrated with ServiceNow, so when a customer has a more technical issue it can be seamlessly routed to the correct customer support team member.
“The integration between TSM and first-line support gives us the best ROI of all the solutions involved in this project. We can connect best of breed technologies to give customers the best possible experience”, Nitin explains.
The ServiceNow solutions also connect to the customer portal, giving staff and customers the ability to see order and ticket status and when field technician visits are scheduled. Rich self-service capabilities give customers the ability to schedule a technician’s visit at a time that is convenient to them, rather than being assigned a slot at the service provider’s convenience.
This level of visibility isn’t only for customers; Staff can also track who’s working on which case, proactively communicate status updates to the customer and monitor KPIs.
Happier customers and staff
With ServiceNow, ACS achieved its goal of launching high speed internet to 10 communities in Alaska. And customers couldn’t be happier with the new service. Since launching, ACS saw a massive uplift in its Net Promoter Score (NPS), which is currently around 60 to 70. “The NPS for home broadband is much higher than for our legacy products; customers love being able to sign up to high-speed internet so quickly”, says Nitin. “Our service is well coordinated from beginning to end”.
Customer Service teams have also enjoyed a better experience with TSM, which helps them to better manage their workday, so they don’t have to rely on emails, memory or colleagues to prioritise their tasks. This, along with the reduction in support calls caused by rolling out self-service, has resulted in engineers freeing up an additional one-third of time to focus on more satisfying work.
“ServiceNow TSM and SOMT are the most popular applications that I’m responsible for. I never get any complaints from users”, Darren comments.
Having a well performing system and great processes in place isn’t just impacting staff satisfaction—high levels of automation mean the team has more time to focus on selling and increasing revenue.
Sharing the service across ATN
With great results from its project, it’s no surprise that ATN will be rolling out ServiceNow to benefit additional operating companies. “I’ve got people proactively reaching out and asking how a similar architecture could help them. We’ve got a shared services model and we’ve already taken steps to expand the solution”, Nitin adds.
And the partnership between ServiceNow and ATN continues to thrive. As Darren explains: “The team at ServiceNow are a breath of fresh air. We can have candid conversations about what’s possible and what isn’t. Our relationship has evolved in leaps and bounds and is really paying dividends. I had a great time working on this project, and I’m still impressed by how quickly this project was completed”.