Telecom leader transforms customer experience through digital innovation

Insights

• Addressing the challenge: The wholesale segment of a telecom company took proactive steps to modernize its legacy systems, aiming to improve efficiency and position itself for growth.
• Self-service empowerment: Self-service capabilities allowed customers to independently manage tasks, access data insights, and customize notifications, improving convenience and control.
• Operational streamlining: Automation simplified order acceptance and bulk quotations, reducing manual work, minimizing errors, and speeding up processes.
• Cost optimization: The product portfolio was optimized, pricing was standardized, and self-service tools were introduced, leading to reduced operational costs and lower support ticket volumes.

A leading telecom company with consumer, small business, enterprise, and wholesale divisions began a digital transformation of its consumer and enterprise segments. This end-to-end transformation aimed to streamline and simplify operations and reduce operating costs by moving its legacy on-premise IT solutions to a cloud-based platform. Since the wholesale segment's products are similar to the others, the company decided to wait until the new digital capabilities for other segments were built and then adopt the same later for wholesale.

However, the wholesale segment couldn’t wait for the entire transformation to take place, as it was facing declining revenues, increased competition, and operational inefficiencies due to outdated systems. The wholesale leadership decided to focus on its high-revenue, customer-facing applications for their IP and products and boost operational efficiency while continuing to use existing on-premises IT back-end systems.

The company decided to partner with Infosys but faced a number of challenges. These included:

• Limited budget: With significant resources already allocated to the consumer and enterprise transformations, the wholesale segment had to proceed with a limited budget.
• Aging system: The outdated technology, shared with the other segments, required careful integration to avoid any disruption to the business or the ongoing transformation.
• Need for flexibility: It needed to be adaptable to future IT system upgrades with minimum technical debt — the cost of additional work that arises when a software development team chooses a quick solution over a more efficient one.

A series of interviews with the wholesale customers (Figure 1) revealed that they were frustrated by multiple disjointed portals, slow order-to-implementation timelines, and lack of standardized application programming interfaces (APIs) to integrate with the telecom company’s IT systems. Another issue the customers faced was long waits for fiber optic to be deployed, preventing them from getting their businesses up and running quickly.

This led to the decision to focus on three key areas: As well as improving the customer experience, the company also wanted to cut operational costs, and to achieve a faster time to market.

Figure 1. Feedback from the telecom’s wholesale customers

Source: Infosys

Key changes and outcomes

Customer experience enhancement

Through a detailed review of customer engagement and operational workflows, the team identified three areas for improvement:

• Multiple customer portals and siloed systems led to a disjointed user experience and longer resolution times.
• Lack of automation in service fulfillment processes and email communications burdened the telecom’s support staff and resulted in slow response times.
• An excessive number of “keep customer informed” (KCI) emails, often lacking clear calls to action, were frequently ignored by customers.

The company decided to focus on the five solutions shown in Figure 2:

Figure 2. Strategic solutions to optimize customer experience

Source: Infosys Knowledge Institute

Platform consolidation: This consolidation results in reduced security risks, eliminates data silos, and improves customer experience. The wholesale segment had eight separate portals for different products and functions, which are now being consolidated into two unified portals. The new consolidated platform simplified the user experience and introduced several customer-centric benefits:

• Comprehensive ticket resolution with full tracking for incident and problem management.
• Real-time transparency on quotes and orders, providing up-to-date status information.
• An integrated view of products, services, quotes, and orders, allowing customers to monitor and manage them with ease.

Self-service capabilities: In today’s digital era, self-service capabilities play a crucial role in shaping customer journeys. The following self-service features enable faster and more convenient service management for customers:

• Standard APIs: Customers with a global presence, especially those working with multiple telecom companies, often prefer using standard APIs for a range of tasks, from placing orders to reporting issues. To meet this demand, TM Forum (TMF) open APIs were developed and deployed, ensuring alignment with the industry standards. However, some customers preferred a more streamlined experience. To accommodate this, custom APIs were created to combine multiple TMF APIs into a single, cohesive process, making the overall customer journey straightforward.
• User access management: Wholesale customers were provided with user admin access so that they could independently manage their users and assign the appropriate access levels without needing support from telecom staff.
• Data insights: Customers could generate performance reports for orders, service health, ensuring optimal performance, and assurance to confirm that issues are resolved within the SLA.
• Notification management: Customers and their users could choose which notifications they wanted to receive for quotes, orders, tickets, diagnostic results, outages, or any combination of these, and how they wanted to receive them.

Optimized service qualification and automated bulk quoting

• A location-based product catalog that displayed all available products for a given address eliminated the need to check availability for each individual product. By showing all serviceable products at a specific location, the portal also fostered cross-selling opportunities.
• Previously, after a customer placed an order, it took up to five days for the wholesale team to manually review and either accept or reject the order. To streamline this, the order capture process was automated, allowing the system to verify that all required details were provided by the customer. As a result, the time for order acceptance was reduced by about 90%, going from five days down to just a few hours.
• Bulk quotations for up to 250 locations, along with automated service qualification and indicative quote generation, were integrated into the portal, streamlining the process for large deals.

Reduced operational costs

To drive operational efficiency and better align with market needs, strategic decisions were made across key business functions:

• The product portfolio was optimized with a 60% reduction in outdated offerings, enabling a more focused product strategy and reduced system complexity.
• Client-specific, customized rate cards were replaced with standardized tiered models based on contract history, simplifying pricing management.
• The order capture system was integrated with fulfillment and provisioning systems through automation, initially with robotic process automation (RPA) and later with TMF-aligned APIs. This minimized manual interventions and reduced errors and delays.
• Self-diagnosis tools and proactive outage notifications were introduced, reducing support ticket volumes by 40%.
• Self-service capabilities for user onboarding both eased bottlenecks and meant the company could reduce costs by using a smaller support team.

Improved time to market and order activation

The wholesale segment of the telecom company struggled with an outdated user interface (UI), an inflexible product and pricing catalog, and delays in fiber-optic deployment, which resulted in slow time to market and prolonged order-to-activation cycles.

• Updated UI: The legacy UI design of the wholesale segment did not provide any flexibility while introducing new products. Each change had to go through page design altering the look and feel for each page, which made it slow and difficult to introduce new products to customers. With the new solution, the website UI was templatized so that introducing a new product was only a matter of filling out forms that got dynamically rendered on the UI.
• Configurable notifications: Each time an application or personnel sent a new type of notification, the process required code changes to handle it — such as determining whether to format and send it to customers or suppress it if it was meant for internal use only. The new system automatically processes notifications and takes the appropriate action, accelerating the deployment of new features and significantly reducing delays caused by manual intervention.
• Modems to back up fiber deployment: To address delays in fiber deployment, the telecom company introduced 5G modems as temporary access points at customer sites until fiber was fully installed. This meant customers had the connectivity they needed immediately, ensuring business continuity. Once the fiber was installed, the 5G modems could be used as backups if necessary to maintain connectivity.

Impact summary

By adopting incremental changes backed by research, addressing customer pain points, and introducing automation, the telecom company not only achieved higher customer satisfaction but also realized substantial gains:

• Significant cost savings were achieved by replacing legacy applications with an omni-channel experience that integrates systems, a self-service portal, and TMF APIs.
• Time to onboard data and IP products in the portals reduced from months to days.
• Number of calls to service qualification checks for product determination reduced by 60%.
• Order acceptance through customer portals reduced the process time by 90%.
• RPA solutions reduced the order fulfillment process by about 70%, saving around 20,000 working hours per year.
• Number of support tickets reduced by 30% with the implementation of API-driven, self-diagnostic tools and outage alerts.

Embrace incremental transformation

Raja Shah, executive vice president and industry head of energy, communications, utilities and services at Infosys, says this about digital transformations of legacy systems: “Our experience and the industry research show that improving customer experiences can drive significant growth for established companies, often enabling them to outperform their competitors. However, implementing these changes can be challenging, particularly when working with legacy systems. Completely replacing these systems can lead to disruptions, increased time, and higher costs. Instead, a more effective approach is to adopt incremental changes and industry-specific frameworks. This allows companies to modernize their operations without interrupting day-to-day business, making the transformation process smoother and more efficient.”

For leaders and businesses embarking on a digital transformation journey struggling to balance the old IT systems and the new developments, the recommendations are clear: gain a deep understanding of customer needs and the core problems and design solutions that address the most critical challenges. Additionally, focus on high-value solutions that solve multiple issues at once. Adhering to industry standards ensures better interoperability, and prioritizing customer centricity and operational efficiencies will drive both cost savings and revenue growth.