Powering connection
For 145 years, Bell (BCE) has been a cornerstone of daily life for millions of Canadians. As Canada's largest communications company and a major retailer, Bell continuously innovates and broadens its range of services in internet, content, infrastructure, business solutions and mobile services. Committed to fostering significant connections, Bell is embracing a technology evolution through the ServiceNow AI Platform to drive business transformation.
"I wake up each day thinking, 'How can we make it easier for our customers to do business with Bell?'" says Hadeer Hassaan, Chief Customer Experience Officer at Bell Canada. "We believe AI can be a game-changer when it comes to the customer experience".
Transforming the service experience for millions of customers
In 2023, Bell embarked on a transformation of its entire service experience. With the help of Ateko, a Bell company and global service integrator, the telco giant is adopting automation, tailored telecommunications solutions and AI-driven insights to deliver improved experiences and service efficiency for technicians and customers. It is the largest ServiceNow implementation in Canada.
For John Watson, Group President, Business Markets, AI & Ateko, Bell Canada, the word 'transformation' just doesn't cut it. "It's about radical change. We're proceeding in a way that's different, and we're leveraging ServiceNow's best-in-class platform with built-in agentic capabilities, to democratise IT". Bell is creating a specific portal for field engineers and a CRM portal for 22 million customers. This will unify 26 distinct applications on a single platform that will accelerate the development of new products and new revenue streams at a significant pace.
"We're bringing together 8,800 data silos to digitise the customer experience", says John. "This project will help guide the behaviours of 40,000 people across the business in making things better and more personal for our customers".
Streamlining service in the field
With a team of 12,000 members managing more than 10,000 field tasks each day, the Bell field services team is among the largest in Canada. The ServiceNow AI Platform for business transformation will unify operations, nationwide, 24/7.
Field Service Management helps service teams arrive on-site with the latest status on the customer issue. Central management can better orchestrate service crews, optimising routes and scheduling. If there is an issue on-site, this can be easily escalated. There is a consistent record of every service interaction, allowing technicians to quickly resolve customer needs.
At Bell's scale, automation and AI-driven action create significant impact. In addition to working towards a 90% reduction in dispatch-related actions, they have also saved over $1M annually on in-house support calls through technicians' use of a self-serve chatbot, and optimised more than two million jobs with machine learning-predicted job duration.
Reimagining the modern telco
The ServiceNow AI Platform is reimagining the way customers engage with Bell. "It is changing the way telcos operate. We are truly able to service, sell and deliver on one platform", says Lukas.
With ServiceNow, Bell is building one platform for service automation. Customers will be able to self-serve a range of tasks, while customers and agents will have a clear view of each stage in a customer's lifecycle. "Being able to shield our agents and our customers from the complexity of multiple systems really simplifies the user experience, saves time and makes us more efficient", shares Hadeer.
AI will further enhance the experience by proactively creating bespoke omnichannel communications for individual customers. "By leveraging ServiceNow AI, we can accomplish incredible and meaningful business outcomes", says Lukas. "We're excited to be at the forefront of contact centre innovation".
Order management is more streamlined now, and the needs of Bell's customers are met in minutes, not days. AI-driven coaching has helped agents handle 180,000 calls, while more than 500,000 customers have been managed with AI-powered Virtual Repair.
"Digital ordering and digital fulfilment are taking the telco experience to a new level", says Lukas.
Accelerating value for enterprise customers
"When you select the best platform, create a centre of excellence where vertical specialists can do great work, and then optimise the goodness of the platform, that's when magic happens", says John.
Bell is leveraging Service Bridge, an application found within the Telecommunications Service Management product that allows Bell to accelerate the delivery of new products to enterprise customers who also use the ServiceNow AI Platform. By streamlining connections between different parts of the business, Bell can work at scale with the agility of a start-up. John says it can have an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) in place within two weeks—an impossibly short time with the previous, siloed structure. "Service Bridge is the best native connector between our business and that of our enterprise customers".
When it comes to a customer's cloud of choice, the ServiceNow platform is helping Bell meet its customers where they are. Whatever the customer's cloud of choice, Bell can be confident it has the platform to interoperate with their cloud strategies. "We see a tremendous amount of opportunity to innovate by offering ways of delivering services and ServiceNow capabilities on the AWS marketplace. It is an interesting opportunity for customers to solve a lot of their procurement challenges", says Lukas. "The AWS marketplace, coupled with ServiceNow, helps customers solve complexity by allowing them to procure, monitor and deliver value in one place".
Bell is leveraging the power of the platform for enterprise customers to make more informed decisions, accelerate revenue growth and drive new, powerful and innovative customer experiences, while delivering meaningful productivity outcomes. "We've figured out the recipe to maximise the absolute best of ServiceNow", says John. "We see an incredible future ahead".