Moving communications service providers beyond traditional telecom

Communications service providers (CSPs) have been at the forefront of the pandemic, helping customers and entire industries make critical transformations almost overnight. When education, healthcare delivery methods, and supply chains were interrupted, CSPs stepped up and provided digital work environments and automations that became lifelines.

Now, CSPs are laying the foundation for even more. Multi-access computing (MEC), 5G, and reducing the cost and complexity of managing networks are only the beginning of what’s to come.

“Our strategy for telecommunications is simple,” says Rohit Batra, head of product for telecommunications and media at ServiceNow. It’s “to be the system of action for CSPs to deliver frictionless workflows across the entire customer journey.”

Simplicity is at the core of ServiceNow: the delivery of products, the ecosystem to enable next-gen services, and the customer experience itself. Whether CSPs are launching new services or transforming an existing business, ServiceNow helps them drive, innovate, and execute transformation strategies by connecting ordering and assurance workflows.

Streamlining order management

Today’s order management approach doesn’t scale to the needs of modern CSPs. It generally requires stitching together multiple disconnected systems and labor-intensive processes.

Deutsche Telekom, one of the world’s leading information and communications technology providers, worked with ServiceNow to streamline its order management process so it could bring solutions to market faster, increase productivity, and reduce the complexity of its web of legacy systems.

With ServiceNow, the company has improved order capture and gained needed billing updates, order orchestration workflows, inventory updates in real time, and the ability to use TM Forum open APIs—all within a single platform.

Proactively addressing customer care

Another challenge for CSPs is the ongoing pressure to reduce cost to serve. For example, a tier 1 telecom provider may have tens of thousands of customer care agents who use multiple, disparate legacy systems with complex processes. This can lead to excessive handling times, rising costs to serve customers, and service-level agreement breaches for enterprise customers.

BT Group, which serves B2B and B2C customers in 180 countries, worked with ServiceNow to transform its BT Meetings division. The different groups making up BT Meetings each used their own processes and tools, many of them customized and at the end of life. Each group also had different service desks that relied on manual processes centered on email and phone.

ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management helped with automation and self-service capabilities—particularly Virtual Agent, Service Catalog, and Predictive Intelligence. As a result, BT moved 70,000 customers and 1 million services to ServiceNow, retired two legacy systems, and achieved a staggering 85% agent satisfaction.

Automating service assurance

Delivering reliable, predictable, and transparent services makes for strong customer relationships, allowing CSPs to protect existing revenue and cross-sell new or expanded services and products.

Lumen turned to the Now Platform to transform the delivery and assurance of its next-generation connectivity services, specifically integrated workflows across Day 1 and Day 2 operations.

“Today’s customer is looking for the package, which means you need to orchestrate across multiple control domains to be able to deliver that capability. We see that as really being one of the strong suits of the ServiceNow platform—to be able to take a larger role within our Lumen ecosystem,” says Shawn Draper, Lumen vice president of enterprise platform engineering.

Learn more about how your communications company can transform the customer and employee experience and better manage network and technology investments. Download our Telecommunications Book of Knowledge.

© 2021 ServiceNow, Inc. All rights reserved. ServiceNow, the ServiceNow logo, Now, and other ServiceNow marks are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of ServiceNow, Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other company names, product names, and logos may be trademarks of the respective companies with which they are associated.