In the Washington DC release, the scope of Order Management for Telecommunications (OMT) expands to include Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications (SOMT), adding a range of exciting new capabilities. SOMT empowers telcos to integrate sales into their operational processes to provide agile, and efficient experiences that accelerate revenue and reduce costs.
Some of the consistent challenges that our telco customers face around sales and order management are as follows:
- Complex product portfolios and pricing models make the order quoting process time consuming
- Disconnected sales and fulfillment systems lead to order inefficiencies, fallouts and revenue leakage
- Poor visibility across the customer lifecycle leads to suboptimal post-sales engagement
Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications addresses all these challenges with a set of applications to manage the product sales lifecycle, including pre-sales opportunities, offer configuration and pricing, sales quote generation, order capture, order fulfillment, and post-sales engagement. It enables organizations to create one continuous value stream by managing the opportunity to renew the lifecycle on one platform. It fuses front, middle, and back office teams with one system of engagement and action.
Let's deep dive into the key features of Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications:
- Product Lifecycle Management
- Opportunity Management
- Quote Management
- Order Capture
- Order Fulfillment
- Customer Contracts & Entitlements
- Product Catalog Management
- Aligned with Industry Standards
Product Lifecycle Management
Product Lifecycle Management enables organizations to establish a consistent structure for their existing products, streamlining sales through fulfillment processes. Moreover, it facilitates the rapid extension of product definitions, empowering the introduction of new services and technologies, and the seamless expansion of the supplier ecosystem.
Opportunity Management
Opportunity Management helps organizations manage the opportunity lifecycle from start to finish.
The capability empowers sales agents to track and manage potential opportunities. When the time is right, they can smoothly progress an opportunity to subsequent stages such as quote creation and generation, order creation, and order fulfillment, all within the unified ServiceNow platform. Opportunities can be imported from third-party systems or created in ServiceNow and pushed to third-party systems. Opportunity Management includes needs analysis, a Kanban view to drag and drop opportunities between stages, opportunity activity tracking, and the ability to easily create quotes from opportunities, elevating efficiency, and customer experience.
Opportunity Kanban view
Quote Management
ServiceNow customers have been looking for an easier, more efficient way to move from quote to sales order to order fulfillment. Prior to this release, moving from quote to order fulfillment required either manual processes or custom integrations, slowing down order fulfillment and increasing costs.
SOMT's Quote Management enables organizations to configure and price quotes, manage the quote lifecycle, and automatically create orders from quotes upon customer acceptance. Quotes can also be imported from third-party systems to streamline quote-to-order processes and workflows.
Quote creation using Product Configurator
Order Capture
Many telcos prefer capturing minimal information initially for products and services, intending to enhance orders later with technical specifics.
The order capture experience has been enhanced through simplified catalog navigation and the introduction of a new user interface for product configuration. This allows for the collection of minimal order details upfront, triggering the creation and assignment of order enrichment tasks after order capture. Additionally, post-sale commercial change order workflows are available to handle move, add, change, and disconnect orders (MACD), leveraging the same product catalog and configurator to offer more upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Order capture with Product Catalog
Order Fulfillment
Order Fulfillment helps order agents monitor the progress of complex orders with multiple products and fulfillment tasks. Complex orders can take several days to complete and involve different teams. Delays at one step can have cascading effects and put the whole order status at risk. Instead of navigating through multiple related lists and tabs to view the complete order status, order agents can now see everything in one place with a chart highlighting any risks. This streamlined approach assists agents in ensuring orders remain on track, enables the prompt identification of delays and potential issues, and enhances customer satisfaction by providing a more precise order status.
Order timeline view
Customer Contracts and Entitlements
Customer Contracts and Entitlements enables contract data to be available in a standardized format to support both post-sale workflows and sync with contracts in third-party systems to give agents a consistent view of contracts. Entitlements have been expanded to support several support hours, hourly rates for extra support, SLAs, extended warranty, and more. A standard API is now available to allow customers to automate entitlement verifications. Entitlement offers can be configured in the product catalog and added to orders, products, and services. Using the commercial MACD workflows (see Order Capture and Fulfillment slide), support agents can now easily modify contract entitlements for customers.
Contract workspace
Product Catalog Management
In this release, Product Catalog Management has been improved to offer agents a more refined configuration and pricing experience, enabling them to configure quotes or orders swiftly and with greater precision. The catalog is now accessible wherever quotes or orders are accessed during sales or support engagements, ensuring seamless availability across various interactions.
Product Catalog
Aligned with Industry Standards
At ServiceNow, we continue to make industry alignment a key pillar of our Telecommunications product strategy. Our TM Forum Open API conformance certification demonstrates our commitment to our customers, embedding standards into our architecture to further accelerate time to value with certified out-of-the-box integrations. We further expand out-of-the-box integration with partners to help simplify integration and reduce time to market.
Aligned with industry standards
Summary
While we have reached the end of this blog, we are just scratching the surface of what's available in Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications. Beneath these capabilities that will boost employee performance are great admin experiences for configuring Sales and Order Management data and processes.
These new and enhanced capabilities empower telcos to define products and services faster, accelerate revenue, and boost customer retention. By leveraging Sales and Order Management for Telecommunications, telcos can accelerate revenue growth and lower costs by delivering customer centric experiences through a single platform. With automation and AI, telcos have the agility to make the best product and service offers to match customer needs, fulfill orders faster with dynamic orchestration, reduce fallouts, and simplify managing post sales activities, leading to enhanced customer loyalty while optimizing productivity.
Check out servicenow.com and review the February 2024 store release notes for more information.
