A frictionless experience for customers and operations

Enabling the business in the B2C market

Radius Telecoms, Inc. (Radius) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Meralco, the largest private sector electric distribution utility company in the Philippines. With connectivity as the backbone of its business, Radius offers high-grade technology through its data, internet, managed services, and cloud solutions to enterprises and small-to-medium-sized businesses.

In 2020, the company expanded its services to the B2C market by providing end-to-end fiber optic internet access, utilizing Gigabit Passive Optical Network (GPON) as last mile technology across several major cities including Mega Manila, Clark, and Cebu. And with the company’s strong resolve to redefine customer service and satisfaction, Radius has renewed its thrust of agility, versatility, and reliability, with the promised benefit of making things happen faster for its customers.

With just 60 days to launch the new RED Fiber service to its new customer base, Radius needed a new solution to manage the entire order lifecycle—from sales leads to the provisioning of services. This allows the company to quickly roll out new services and improve response time to customer requests.

“In just two months, we have gone live with the ServiceNow platform. This allowed us to meet our aggressive go-live target,” says Rocky Bacani, First Vice President and Chief Information and Technology Officer at Meralco and Chief Technology Advisor at Radius Telecom. “We can now rapidly implement an all-digital and all-cloud customer-to-billing platform for RED Fiber, empowering our operations to deliver exceptional customer service experiences.”

Faster turnaround time in service activation with streamlined operations

Radius has rolled out two channels through which subscribers may apply for their RED Fiber account.

The first is through direct sales. On-the-ground resellers conduct door-to-door sales to acquire new sign-ups. This was initially done with paper-based application forms. Those paper forms were then transcribed into a spreadsheet and encoded into ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management. This process was not only tedious, but also time-consuming and error-prone, making it difficult to scale order volumes. It has since been replaced by a mobile application which salespeople can use with customers.

Using ServiceNow Automation Engine to connect with other systems, direct sales agents can capture customer information with a smart device connected to the ServiceNow platform instead of waiting for paper forms to be returned to the office. The automation has eliminated post-encoding of applications and has re-assigned its 14 full-time encoders to accomplish other tasks, resulting in higher employee satisfaction. And as a result of these improvements, Radius has had 20% year-over-year growth in revenue.

The second channel is through the RED Fiber Customer Portal. To proceed with an application, new subscribers need to enter their information in an online application form. A credit check process is then conducted (including the upload of identification cards and proof of billing) through a system in Meralco. Once the customer is approved for the service, the customer care representative creates a work order and dispatches a field technician on-site to do the service installation.

With the goal of reaching 100,000 subscribers by end of 2022, Radius has automated the end-to-end process from customer order to installation with ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management and ServiceNow Field Service Management. This enables the company to provide a frictionless experience for customers through every step of the order lifecycle. As such, it significantly shortens time to revenue.

Radius also uses ServiceNow Automation Engine to integrate ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management and ServiceNow Field Service Management with applications, including Jumio for identity verification and Zuora for billing. This enables the company to seamlessly complete the credit verification for potential subscribers and move on to the next step.

Customer service agents now have full visibility to the status of customer orders at every stage and can respond more quickly to issues.

“Thanks to the automation in order management, we’ve significantly reduced the sales lead to cash time, and realized revenue faster for over 500 RED Fiber daily applications,” says Kiko Trinidad, Head of Solutions Delivery for Information Technology.

In the past, Radius’ operations team had to manually copy and paste dispatch information into a report for field technicians. By automating the dispatching process with ServiceNow Field Service Management, hundreds of field technicians can easily view and track their work orders via a mobile app. They can also provision services by simply clicking one button and scanning a bar code.

“With the help of ServiceNow Field Service Management, our field operations team has been able to save a total of 72 man-hours each day—that’s equivalent to nine full-time workers,” adds Rocky.

“By uniting telecom service and field operations on one platform, we can provision services to new subscribers the next day instead of in five days,” says Kiko. “ServiceNow empowers us to quickly realize the potential of growth opportunities and be one step closer to achieving our target.”

Transformation in enterprise service management

Since Radius deployed ServiceNow Telecom Service Management, it can now quickly respond to hundreds of service requests on average each week. This allows the business to cut support costs and provide timely responses to customer requests, such as network issues.

Radius worked with ServiceNow partners Nexus Technologies, Inc. and Enable Professional Services (Enable PS) for its digital transformation journey in service management and telecom service operations. Part of Radius Telecoms’ roadmap is to roll-out an enterprise service management solution with ServiceNow across the organization. This will include replacing the legacy system for the telco network team and expanding into finance, HR, and procurement. Radius expects to further reduce costs and elevate the customer experience as a result of its second phase of digital transformation.

“ServiceNow provides out-of-the-box workflows for ordering and customer care, giving us the confidence to deliver faster and better services and support future growth,” concludes Kiko.