Digital transformation? It's about relationship building

By Marc Desmots, IT Architect, Orange Business Services

When I think about digital transformation, the first words that spring to mind are collaboration, integration and partnerships.

Yes, of course it is about transforming a company to work more digitally and data can be the key to unlocking competitiveness. But what I see time and time again in practice is that striking the right long-term partnerships – both with customers and technology vendors – is key to successful transformation.

At Orange Business Services, it is in our DNA to co-construct, co-innovate and work together with customers to build a lasting digital transformation for their business. At the same time, with the huge number of systems that our multinational customers demand, it becomes very important to find agile and flexible technology partners that we can work with too.

A seamless customer experience through multisourcing service integration

Our company’s approach to collaboration and co-creation is powering digital transformation for our customers and the IT team is central to managing every customer journey.

The multisourcing service integration (MSI) approach starts with an initial synchronisation phase and runs right through to a unified service for customers. In practice, MSI for Orange Business Service means a flexible and easy-to-use service platform for customers that complements our carrier-grade systems.

We’re giving customers visibility and control by creating a unified vision of performance of their IT landscape. The key word here is platform. In our case, it is the ServiceNow platform that layers over an incredibly complex technology ecosystem within Orange Business Services.

Sitting between our systems and our customers, ServiceNow removes the complexity of managing heterogenous infrastructures. Most importantly for our customers, it creates an interface offering a consistent, simple and seamless experience.

A single service portal

Simple was not a word I would associate with our customer interface in the past. The number of customer calls my team was receiving about the progress of incidents was high.

But as a result of our own internal transformation we have created a standard interface that has brought together all elements of our offering in one place. This is our new customer service portal – the heart of Orange Business Services’ customer-facing organisation.

Our customers use the portal to follow the journey of any incidents from when they were raised right through to resolution, without having to contact us directly. The transparency and ease-of-use of the portal has eliminated the need to make a direct call, resulting in a dramatic reduction of the 3,000+ calls we were receiving every month.

Now, the platform is managing more than one million incidents a year and the digital workflows powered by ServiceNow work automatically in the background, driving significant operational efficiencies.

From transformation to a revolution

In this day and age transformation is an ongoing process, however, I see the potential to do much more, to create a step-change — or a revolution perhaps — in the way we work with customers. The opportunity to take our relationship with customers to a whole new level is there for the taking.

We’ve already started with an offer of ‘self care’, which gives customers the ability to manage their Orange Business Services solutions themselves. Using ServiceNow, we offer a ‘one-stop-shop’ experience, putting day-to-day technical management capability into our customers’ own hands, whether they want to change bandwidth or update a routing rule.

I know that in ServiceNow we have a flexible and agile platform with a low-code/no-code capability that makes anything possible, providing a foundation for a truly collaborative environment between Orange Business Services and its customers.

A long-term commitment

As I mentioned at the start it is values like co-innovation, collaboration and long-standing partnerships that form our DNA. ServiceNow enables us to put these values into practice and co-create in partnership with our customers.

We have nurtured a long-term partnership with ServiceNow too. As with any relationship, it is when both parties share the same ambition and work to the same rhythm that the greatest synergies occur.

Both ServiceNow and Orange Business Services recognise the huge opportunity that is presented by digital transformation. I’m excited to see what the next 10 years hold for our partnership.