KPN redefines customer service through streamlined order management

On a mission to deliver customer excellence 
KPN works hard to connect everyone in the Netherlands to a sustainable future, delivering telecommunications and IT services efficiently to consumer and business customers across the Netherlands. The leading telco, with around 10,000 employees, implements complex infrastructure projects for its clients, including the Dutch Government. KPN has installed some 6.6 million broadband connections and has 5.7 million mobile subscribers.

Its mission is clear: to be the network of the Netherlands, both in terms of infrastructure and in connecting people. This mission is well on its way to accomplishment under the company’s ‘accelerate to grow’ strategy.

Eliminating silos in a connected world
Key to its mission is its ‘service-defined networking’ approach, which focuses on customer intent and providing sustainable solutions rather than confusing parcels of individual, distinct products. Its mantra of end-to-end solution delivery marks an important goal in KPN’s digital service provision strategy, and a sector shift in terms of customer-centric solutions delivery.

“Service-defined networking delivers the customer experience first for KPN’s entire portfolio,” says Joris Scharpff, IT Architect Order & Delivery at KPN. “It’s a real change in the market; customers want solutions, not lots of components that they need to hook up.”

One key obstacle to efficiency lies in numerous product silos which hampers the highest levels of customer service that KPN wants to deliver. KPN is in the middle of a transition from a classical, siloed, network-oriented service provider to a full digital service provider (DSP) to meet the challenges of an industry that is constantly evolving and reinventing itself. Its DSP strategy is built on three key goals: to be fully catalog-driven; to eliminate end-to-end product silos; and to design, sell, deliver, and service multi-component solutions instead of individual products.

To make this shift, KPN has started eliminating its end-to-end product silos to meet the emerging digital landscape with a plug-and-play model. It wants to bring customers into a new shared IT architecture, providing them with clearer visibility into the product components of their desired solutions. Thus enabling a service-defined experience for its customers.

Connecting customers, networks, and organizations
With ServiceNow as its driving platform, KPN adopted intent-based service orchestration to first define the needs of the customer and match these with a complete solution, thereby eliminating product silos in order management and delivery.

The target of becoming fully catalog-driven is also high among KPN’s other two strategic goals. ServiceNow’s Telecommunications Service Management solution (TSM) and Order Management for Telecommunications (OMT) are the catalyst, mobilizing the power of the digital ecosystem to connect customer and network on one cloud-native platform. Collectively, TSM and OMT’s key applications have scaled to convey information precisely and seamlessly, resulting in more closely matching customer expectations and a streamlined user experience.

“It’s important to be fully catalog-driven; it’s central to being a digital service provider,” Joris says. “The end-to-end catalog captures the commercial, functional, and technical aspects of every KPN service. Importantly, the Now Platform with TSM and OMT, along with out-of-the-box capabilities, meets industry standards and the catalog management around this, supporting KPN’s entire catalog.”

Accelerating to grow – the sum and its parts
Using ServiceNow to implement a unified approach to end-to-end solution delivery – rather than product-driven delivery – marks an important achievement for KPN in its mission to digitalize service experience for its customers. With every service provided by KPN now captured, access to the solution as a whole is quicker and easier, thereby making service delivery more efficient and the customer experience smoother.

Another key focus for KPN is resource management, which underpins its adoption of software-defined networking (SDN), driven by the customer intent. This is often referred to as Service Defined Networking and brings many customer benefits. SDN’s orchestration prowess frees expertise, allowing technical departments to focus on strategic initiatives instead. It also forges flexible, secure, and reliable network connectivity within, and between, offices.

“Software Defined Networking is something we discuss a lot,” says Joris. “Globally scattered devices must be united and driven by software. The idea of Service Defined Networking, in other words driving configuration from a functional intent is, in our view, the key to future-fit resource orchestration.”

KPN’s customer-centric strategy has progressed rapidly, but the telco feels there’s still much to do.

"It’s been three months since we went ‘production live’ with an initial set of products but we’re working very hard to get everything fully live now,” says Joris. “We’ve barely started our order management story in the many sectors that would benefit, from healthcare to retail, so that’s a priority.”

Provider and customer have many reasons to be buoyant and KPN’s operational metrics speak for themselves. Order management is now streamlined, with custom tables down from 15 to 0. Thanks to fully catalog-driven orchestration, complex order processing times have dramatically improved from what used to take three days to less than one minute. And the order fall-out percentage is down from 7% to under 1%.

Driving intent-based service experiences further
Joris’s faith is simply stated: “ServiceNow is the beating heart of our new digital landscape. It allows us to more effectively engage with our B2B customers.” This enthusiasm is tempered by the challenges KPN faces, and those faced by the industry at large. Departmental declutter is a target, to promote streamlining and help minimize provider-customer journey time.

“Many global organizations have a different department for sales and for delivery, and so on,” says Joris. “Bridging that gap is complex. Solving it with end-to-end delivery is an important but challenging issue to tackle.” 

This seems to be the industry irony for those companies in the business of connectivity while hampered by disconnected internal legacy processes. 

“The division between day one and day two operations is a good example thereof, and something we’re keen to improve at KPN,” admits Joris. “Mastering this aspect will be a digital transformation for all of us. We’re working hard to connect day one and day two, with TSM and OMT being the ideal framework to build that link.”

Joris is enthusiastic about the possibilities ahead.

A reduction of silos, with faster, efficient operation and a single service-based view of orders combine to position KPN as a far more agile business than its size and reach suggest.

And there’s more.

“Ultimately, we want to give the customer the ability to self-serve and self-manage their solution quickly and effectively,” he says. “Perhaps by going inside our portal to edit and build their service-defined solution for various business locations. We could then just quote and deliver.”

An aim worthy of KPN’s mission to be the network of the Netherlands.

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