Acronym accelerates service delivery with consistent processes

Prioritising customer, employee services
Acronym enables Canadian businesses to keep pace with increasing customer demands. The company started out supporting the telecommunications network underlying Ontario’s electrical grid several years ago. But its visionary leadership saw much bigger opportunities and set out to rebrand Acronym as a broad provider of information and communications technology services, addressing everything from cloud security and unified communications to alternative forms of connectivity like SD-WAN.

“Connectivity and communications are foundational to us, but it’s only part of our story today”, says Robert Agostino, Vice President of Engineering and IT, Acronym, “We continue to expand our target customers, network and product portfolio as we evolve from a connectivity provider to a full information and communications technology company that empowers middle market businesses to efficiently innovate, reduce costs and increase revenue”. 

The evolution at Acronym is all part of a corporate transformation to fundamentally reimagine not just its products and services but also how internal teams work together and with customers. “Delivering outstanding customer experiences is central to our identity and success”, explains Agostino, “For us, smart IT ensures that we can offer both customers and our employees excellent experiences in every interaction”. 

Breaking down team silos
One of the biggest challenges facing Acronym in its corporate transformation came from siloed, legacy IT systems and disjointed team collaboration. Service and support applications at the company were never conceived as an integrated, end-to-end experience. As a result, there were problems responding efficiently to customer requests, with employees working in different systems and managing manual steps that offered no insight into what everyone else was doing.

“Teams were frustrated and essentially blind to many things going on in the company”, says Agostino, “The lack of 360° visibility delayed customer orders, drove up support costs and impacted revenue. We needed to gain better visibility into our own workflows and simplify operations by automating manual processes before helping customers and partners do the same. ServiceNow became a beacon for us”.

Standardising on best-in-class products
Acronym worked with EY to deploy several ServiceNow Telecommunications products, including Telecommunications Service Management, Telecommunications Service Operations Management and Order Management for Telecommunications to streamline time and process-intensive processes across departments. The company also built personalised portals that make it simple for customers to submit and monitor change orders and service requests. At the same time, intuitive administrative tools optimise performance reporting so Acronym teams can reliably manage every activity.

“ServiceNow empowers us to be digital-first by connecting customers, suppliers, partners and employees”, explains Agostino, “Even if a customer calls our service centre, the first place an employee goes to is ServiceNow. We’ve modified our workflows so that everything funnels into ServiceNow. It’s the perfect environment to create unified experiences and a single source of truth by centralising, tracking and managing how everyone works together”. 

For further efficiencies, Acronym uses Service Bridge capabilities to directly integrate with enterprise customers’ ServiceNow instances. The benefits include accelerating system integration, automating third-party manual processes—including order orchestration and task distribution and optimising operations management. “Service Bridge enables different systems to easily connect so employees, partners and customers can communicate more effectively”, says Agostino, “I call this e-bonding because people are behind every digital experience”. 

In addition, Acronym uses ServiceNow to seamlessly support omni-channel experiences across devices and applications—and granularly control access levels to comply with security and data privacy requirements. “By harnessing ServiceNow, we’ve overhauled technology operations cost-effectively at one of Canada’s largest electricity suppliers and reduced new service delivery wait times from weeks to hours”, explains Agostino.

Acronym also relies on ServiceNow to optimise information and communications technology case management and monitor enterprise-wide interactions to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). This data allows Acronym to quickly launch targeted low-code solutions and services that better align with client priorities.

Real-world impacts for Acronym and clients
ServiceNow enables Acronym to continue building on its reputation as a customer centric, full-service information and communications technology company. Also critical, the single-pane-of-glass visibility supported by ServiceNow dashboards allows Acronym to better manage end-to-end service delivery.

“ServiceNow is a game-changer”, explains Agostino, “Processes that previously took our teams days can now be done in minutes and new services deployed in just hours”. 

With ServiceNow, Acronym has already seen a 60% increase in NPS and CSAT scores by fulfilling customer orders 50% faster. Equally impressive: incoming service requests are up 3900%, without any increase in headcount. The streamlined operations and lower costs supported by ServiceNow enable Acronym teams to focus more time on increasing revenue by delivering new services such as SIP Trunking and Managed IT.

“Automating manual processes, such as ingesting and routing emails from vendors, enables us to cost-effectively and efficiently handle a tsunami of orders”, says Agostino, “With ServiceNow, we’re minimising clicks while eliminating time-consuming copy-and-paste tasks”. 

The company plans to further augment ServiceNow capabilities by pairing ServiceNow Impact with existing telecom solutions to design, deliver and manage new end-to-end services. ServiceNow Impact combines AI-powered recommendations, expert guidance and premium tech support and tools—all delivered in a personalised digital experience. “Adding ServiceNow Impact to our ServiceNow deployment will make it even easier for us to develop, launch and manage new customised solutions”, says Agostino, “In parallel, we look forward to integrating additional products and services—such as our new CRM—with ServiceNow”. 

ServiceNow helps Acronym teams make smarter, data-driven decisions that benefit customers and the entire company, from sales and marketing all the way to the field. “With ServiceNow supporting our transformation, we can put forth the exact image we want to our customers. Acronym is all about simplifying and improving how companies operate and ServiceNow enables us to get there.”

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