Unlocking the Telco Tangle

When I listen to our telecommunications customers describe their biggest frustrations, a consistent theme is the need to seamlessly connect across silos, systems, and processes. Work should be intuitive.

But as work-from-home directives have transformed living rooms into makeshift offices, classrooms, and gyms, telcommunications providers – the backbone of the new normal – must transform operations and remove friction points to deliver seamless work experiences as transmission loads and reliance on networks skyrocket.

As companies prepare to restart in the second half of 2020, telco executives must ensure that COVID-era digital transformation projects fit this new framework properly.

Simplifying the Spaghetti
Among all the changes for telcos this year, one thing has remained the same: the need to seek competitive advantage through greater agility and scale. Digitizing to become more customer-centric is non-negotiable, regardless of a company’s size or market position.

Telcos require increasingly smart and flexible combinations of technology infrastructure, as they simplify the process of meeting the communication needs of consumer and enterprise customers.

The customer journey, however, could hardly be more complex.

Take the home broadband installation process: internet service providers must navigate numerous touchpoints in the provisioning process – including wholesale backhaul and transit providers, peering partners, physical installation, delivery and set up of routers, activation – before billing the customer.

While most enterprises have four to five core platforms in their ecosystem that employees need to manage, for telcos that number is often greater.

Digital transformation of the telco enterprise, therefore, two major goals: Unlocking productivity through automation and orchestration of workloads across every department, and creating great experiences for customers and employees – by focusing on what people encounter, observe, or feel when they interact with a service. Employees, for instance, shouldn’t have to spend a lot of time looking for things; to the contrary, things should come looking for them.

It is this industry-wide challenge to simplify spaghetti-like internal systems and processes that led ServiceNow to develop a solution specifically for telecommunications providers.

Delivered in partnership with Accenture, our suite of workflows will change how telcos operate and support their delivery of reimagined customer experiences.

We’ve created intelligent workflows that align customer care and service assurance by proactively anticipating customer-facing issues and addressing them quickly. Our solution uses machine learning to help remove back-office bottlenecks and orchestrate workflows between departments. 

By applying intelligence to everyday processes within the telco – prioritizing, categorizing, routing workflows, predicting anomalies – employees get more work more easily.  Data can be quickly and accurately correlated to identify common errors. Remediations can be predicted, freeing up employees to personalize the customer experience.

Francesco Venturini, Accenture’s senior managing director and communications & media industry lead, said this new set of integrated solutions will improve automation, efficiency, and effectiveness in customer service management, service assurance, and intelligent network operations through a combination of technology, analytics, and operation solutions.

Complexity demands simplicity
As organizations prepare for the next wave of challenges, investment in digital transformation will help reshape business and boost productivity. With the transition to 5G underway, and as utilities move into broadband and telcos eyeing new opportunities in the energy industry, customer experience will become the next competitive battleground.

ServiceNow’s telecommunications solution accelerates digital transformation, breathing new life into legacy platforms and putting people at the heart of every workflow. The onus is on senior executives to ensure that native digital experiences go well beyond front-of-house teams to embrace the enterprise.