Elevating customer service to support growth
PLDT Inc. is the largest integrated telecommunications network company in the Philippines. Its subsidiary Smart Communications Inc. (Smart) provides wireless communication services including 4G/LTE, 5G, high-speed internet connectivity and digital services, and content to over 71.2 million mobile subscribers, covering about 96% of the country’s cities and municipalities.
When the pandemic struck in early 2020, people across the country switched to working or studying from home or remotely. Customer demand for home internet and mobile services rose sharply as a result. With PLDT and Smart also forced to close their physical retail stores, the group needed to rethink their service delivery to address this demand.
As an advocate of customer-centricity, PLDT and Smart President and CEO Alfredo S. Panlilio has constantly communicated how the company prioritises customer experience and aims for constant improvement. “We strive to operate efficiently as we commit to power Filipinos’ increasingly digital lifestyles," Alfredo says.
With support from ServiceNow partner Nexus, PLDT adopted ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) Professional with Customer Service Management Professional and Automation Engine to build the Sana All (‘hope for all’) portal for its employee ambassador programme. Its goal was to ensure that all PLDT and Smart employees could quickly respond to customer requests and raise the quality of customer service.
Single employee and customer experience portal
Before ServiceNow, customer issues in PLDT were captured by manual forms and sent to separate email addresses. Fulfilment teams then had to read and understand the emails before determining the right person in the Customer Experience (CX) team to handle each request. This manual process led to long processing times and dissatisfied customers.
“With lockdowns limiting staff to work remotely during the pandemic, it was not possible for different teams to collaborate on a request using their legacy on-premise systems. A lot of non-frontline employees also didn’t even know where to go if they received a customer complaint,” says Grace Plata of the Office of the Chief of Staff and Accounts and Portfolio Management Lead at PLDT and Smart.
PLDT and Smart initially deployed ServiceNow ITSM which included Service Catalog and Virtual Agent capabilities. With ServiceNow ITSM holding a leading position with Gartner and employees already familiar with the product, PLDT and Smart were confident that its respective teams could quickly adopt new services by upgrading to ServiceNow ITSM Professional and integrating with Salesforce via ServiceNow Automation Engine to build the Sana All program.
With the ServiceNow platform, PLDT and Smart not only improved collaboration across teams, but also enabled more employees, including non- frontliners, to escalate customer concerns. For example, customers and Smart employees now receive automatic email notifications whenever there is an update on the fulfilment of a request or the resolution of issues. The CX team can also consistently access request information and call customers back immediately to follow up on requests or issues such as internet outages.
Grace says: “ServiceNow provides end-to-end visibility for employees to quickly respond to customers about problem resolution. Customers also know that their requests are being looked after and resolved.”
John Lao, Operations Head for the High Value Care Segment at PLDT and Smart also explains: “With the sudden spike in new sales and customer requests, we wanted to make sure that every PLDT and Smart employee was empowered to extend their assistance and help to our customers.”
Leveraging the dynamic workflows in ServiceNow, Carlo Guevarra, IT Manager at PLDT and Smart, and his team can easily create service catalogues for VIP and regular customers within ServiceNow ITSM Professional. These workflows enable the fulfilment team to route requests to the CX team more efficiently.
“Thanks to ServiceNow, our CX team’s average response time has been improved by 50%—just under two hours instead of over three and a half,” says Carlo. “Support agents can also provide more meaningful responses to customers compared to the previously available robotic replies.”
Improving employee satisfaction and lowering churn
With the Sana All portal, more than 14,000 group-wide employees are encouraged to be PLDT and Smart brand ambassadors and refer new services such as upgrading from 3G or 4G/LTE to 5G service, to family and friends. This employee ambassador programme also involved training activities for all employees on how to further enhance the customer experience.
“Since we launched the Sana All portal on the Now Platform, we have fulfilled over 150,000 service requests, while more than 100,000 customers have been referred by the employee ambassador programme over the past three years,” says Carlo.
“The Sana All portal goes beyond simply passing customer concerns to the right people in support and providing updates. It’s like combining an employee and customer experience into one.”
Thanks to the ServiceNow dashboard, PLDT and Smart employees can now see real-time information on the number of cases they have referred via the programme. This boosts staff morale and further encourages them to refer more customers.
“Some employees have even taken photos while they were helping customers in the mall. It’s one reason why our Net Promoter Score for employee satisfaction is now over 85%,” adds Carlo.
The combination of timely and helpful support and the Ambassador programme has also helped to prevent at least $400,000 of customer churn—a significant achievement in a highly competitive telecommunications industry.
Boosting revenue by capitalising on the group’s ecosystem
PLDT and Smart are part of the MVP Group, chaired by Filipino business tycoon Manuel V Pangilinan. The conglomerate consists of 35 companies that cover a range of critical sectors such as energy, utilities, roads and infrastructure.
With a focus on growing B2B customers across the group, PLDT and Smart have expanded to ServiceNow Customer Service Management Professional and integrated with Microsoft Azure and the MVP Group’s Active Directory using ServiceNow Automation Engine spokes. This gives PLDT the agility to securely share Service Catalogs with broader group companies simply by creating and publishing the same Service Catalog—such as internet connectivity—via Customer Service Management.
“The capability of ServiceNow enables us to capitalise on the strength of our group’s ecosystem and contribute to around $1.52 million in revenue generated via the Sana All program,” says Carlo.
“ServiceNow is repeatable and reliable, making it easy to roll the programme out to potentially 50,000 employees instead of just 14,000 PLDT and Smart employees,” John adds.
Maximising return on investment
Unlike legacy on-premise systems that rely on VPN, PLDT and Smart have built a mobile app using the low-code ServiceNow App Engine and Automation Engine, enabling employees to access the portal anywhere, anytime.
The out-of-the-box functionality offered by ServiceNow also means PLDT and Smart can further refine customer service processes and deliver a superior experience.
“We are starting to build data for performance analytics and create topics that will enable chatbots within the organisation,” says Carlo. “For one of our top B2B clients, we are also looking to create a portal through which it can submit requests via ServiceNow Customer Service Management and tap into ServiceNow ITSM for internal support.”
Carlo summarises that ServiceNow has empowered PLDT and Smart to vastly improve customer service, boost employee satisfaction and maximise returns on investment. The successes at PLDT are now also inspiring its affiliate companies into an exciting future.
“PLDT and Smart's initiatives toward operational excellence and enhanced customer experience are part of the Group's aspirational multi-year transformation,” concludes Julie C. Carceller, First Vice President, Chief of Staff of President and CEO Alfredo S. Panlilio, and Head of Strategic Program Management at PLDT and Smart. “With the ServiceNow Platform, our employees are empowered to deliver faster and better customer service and bring benefits to PLDT’s bottom line.”