Where to Start Your Telco Digital Transformation

[Chris Pearson]

Embarking on a telco digital transformation journey can be overwhelming, but the key to success lies in building a strong data foundation. Start with the basics: accounts, contacts, and locations. Ensuring that this data is clean and accurate is essential for a seamless transformation. Integrate data directly from your ‘source of truth’ platforms to maintain consistency and avoid duplication, setting the stage for a smoother transition.

The journey begins with Telecommunications Service Management (TSM), which extends the very mature Customer Service Management (CSM) application and is bundled with ServiceNow's full suite of IT Service Management (ITSM) applications when licensed. This includes modules for Incident, Problem, Change, Request, IT Asset Management, and the CMDB. By leveraging TSM, you ensure your organization is equipped with the tools needed to manage services efficiently.

Next, create a bespoke customer-facing portal that offers a user-friendly interface for your customers. This portal should allow customers to interact with support teams, view their purchased products and inventory, raise support cases, and access self-help knowledge.

Then, import all previously sold products into ServiceNow’s Product Inventory table, ensuring each sold product is matched with a placeholder product offering and specification in your Product Catalog. This ensures accurate tracking of customer assets, laying a strong foundation for your digital transformation journey. In this phase we do not have to fully conceptualize our products into the 'PSR' model, however ensuring that we have at least a stub record in our catalog which is associated to each of the sold products we import is critical for a smooth transition once we begin to move away from legacy order management platforms and onto ServiceNow.

Finally, consider linking the previously sold products you've imported to corresponding services in the ServiceNow CMDB and then enriching this data with the broad strokes of network topologies by integrating with your current CMDB platform. We don't need a full and detailed view at this stage of the transformation program, however syncing a handful of critical classes of CI's with your source of truth for CMDB data will enable your support and NOC to better see break/fix issues within ServiceNow and enable ServiceNow's Proactive Service Experience capabilities.

With this initial phase of your digital transformation journey you immediately begin to extract value from your ServiceNow investment, transitioning your support teams into a single customer support platform with the supporting data they need to do their jobs: Account data, location data, contact information, sold products, product configurations, high level network topologies in the CMDB.

#SOMT #TSM #TNI #TSOM #Telecom #Thirdera