Telia embraces 5G with automated service assurance

The cradle of digital innovation  
Telia Company is the leading digital communications company in the Nordic and Baltic regions of Europe, one of the most connected in the world, and often described as the global “cradle of digital innovation”. 

The company provides essential digital infrastructure and mobile, fixed and media services for 25 million customers, including citizens, governments, hospitals, schools and public and emergency services.

Telia is the hub of the digital ecosystem in six countries – Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Estonia and Lithuania – connecting people, communities and businesses 24/7 to services that entertain, enable, enrich and empower their lives.

Headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden, its 20,000 employees are the public faces of an organisation deeply committed to the sustainable use of digital technology to improve lives, economies, societies and the environment for the 32 million citizens in the countries it serves.

Embracing automation to empower agents
With the advent of 5G powering the Internet of Things, for Telia and its customers alike, the maintenance of secure, reliable and efficient network connectivity and services is vital.

Today every aspect of society – the business community, essential national infrastructure, smart cities, telehealth services, remote working, and learning – relies on fast and uninterrupted access to the internet.

Telia has been transitioning from legacy technologies and systems, and an extended supply chain across six countries that created increasing challenges for its network operations teams in recent years. 

These complexities produced a fragmented view of the network, labour-intensive incident management processes, and problems identifying root causes of network issues, making it difficult for Telia’s agents to provide timely and accurate information to customers.

Telia knew it needed to do better for both customers and employees. It embarked on a transformation journey to move to a fully automated, AI-enabled service assurance model, complete with the technology to detect network disruptions, identify root causes and potential impacts on customers faster and more precisely, and deal with each incident quickly and effectively.

Harnessing the power of customer and technology operations 
Telia’s strategic partnership with ServiceNow provides fast access to world-class expertise and support in service assurance and collaborative working, resulting in the co-creation of some aspects of the solution with ServiceNow.

“Previously we had a huge amount of data coming in, but it was stuck in silos”, explains Malin Fransen Kronberg, Director, Service Assurance at Telia Company. “Fixing a network issue was very stressful for our people given our critical role in society, and sometimes it took days to get to the bottom of a problem. We needed to completely transform this situation.” 

Malin and her team spent a lot of time talking to customers and colleagues to listen and understand their needs and aspirations, to develop a network service quality strategy and investment programme. “A key goal was to orchestrate all our processes and connect our technology operations with our customer operations so that our activities are driven by data and insights that help deliver a great customer experience.”

Filtering out the noise
With ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management and Telecommunications Service Operations Management in place, Telia can drive efficiencies across its incident management and service management capabilities, while improving communications between customers, care agents and operations teams. 

Network issues are automatically sent from Telia’s Network Operations Centre to the Now Platform and assessed for priority against pre-set thresholds and impact on customers. Leveraging the service aware Configuration Management Database (CMDB) platform, network alarms are converted to incidents and impacted customers are identified. Workflows notify customers proactively and help teams quickly resolve problems. Proactively notifying customers based on issues on the network yields to not only an improved customer experience, but direct reduction in cost by avoiding calls to the contact centre.

Of the millions of events occurring on the network every second, the Now Platform and other supporting platform extract several significant events every day. Network events are now resolved through automation.

As Malin explains: “We have a massive amount of data and ServiceNow automation helps us to filter out all of the background noise and focus immediately on alerts that are impacting the network and customers.” 

Now Telia can identify patterns or trends that may be a sign of underlying issues that need attention. Business intelligence like this is invaluable to field technicians, making them more focused, efficient and cost-effective. With the right information, Telia can help prevent problems before they occur and inform smart, long-term maintenance and investment decisions.

One platform for empowering teams across six countries 
“Working in one ServiceNow platform is a game-changer for our people”, says Malin. “When I saw the single workspace for the first time, I got goosebumps. Having our data in one place is completely empowering.” With ServiceNow Telecommunications Service Management and Telecommunications Service Operations Management in place, Telia can drive efficiencies across its incident management and service management capabilities, while improving communications between customers, care agents and operations teams.

“Using the same system, but contextualised for six countries, will be very rare and rather amazing.” Telia is rolling out its ServiceNow automated service assurance system in Norway, as a testing ground before extending the use across all six markets.

“We’re now connecting our technology and customer operations into a common platform, processing enriched data from alarms, automatically carrying out impact analysis and understanding which customers and services are affected. Customer notifications are proactively generated, automatically dispatching to the workforce, triggering resolutions and recovery activities.” 

Malin and her team can now also share accurate data and insights about the network throughout the business, enabling a broader appreciation of its performance. 

“Explaining the initial impact in Norway to our executive management was very powerful. They were amazed! Everyone can see the huge potential. With one common platform, consolidated teams and operations, every improvement will automatically benefit all customers in all our territories.”

Accessing world-class expertise 
Telia enhanced its long-standing commercial relationship with ServiceNow, signing a strategic partnership agreement and deciding to standardise its network service operations on the Now Platform. 

Rainer Deutschmann, Group Chief Operating Officer at Telia Company, says: “Our innovation partnership with ServiceNow will push the boundaries of service management. Our expanded collaboration is an integral part of our transformation journey, where we embrace intelligent automation to deliver even better customer experiences, operational excellence, resilience and efficiency to benefit our consumer and enterprise customers across all our markets.

“ServiceNow’s increasing focus on telecoms and service assurance is very significant for us. It’s been our ambition to combine technology and customer operations and ServiceNow does this. With ServiceNow, service assurance will be a key differentiator for us.

“With all the capabilities and functionalities within the ServiceNow portfolio, we have a clear roadmap ahead to harmonise our systems, free up resources and skilled people to address challenges throughout our organisation, and pursue growth and expansion into new territories. 

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