Taking telco service delivery to the next level

What is service delivery?

In general, service delivery is the process of providing services to customers (from receiving an order through turn up, customer support, all the way to decommissioning).

In the world of telecommunications, service delivery is often used to indicate a narrower process between receiving a purchase order to delivery and turnup.

Telcos often separate service delivery (initial turn up, activation) from assurance (subsequent support, ticketing, uptime & availability assurance, etc.).

Why is service delivery experience important?

Service delivery is the first customer experience after a purchase, and it sets the tone for the future. In the world of telco services, only support experience is more important to the users.

A good service delivery usually goes unnoticed, but problems in the process can do a lot of damage affecting not only customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores but also future revenue.

Service delivery challenges

Telecommunications providers (and service delivery managers specifically) face the following business challenges:

1. Rising expectations in terms of delivery speed/shorter intervals and experience (fewer problems, better customer communication).
2. Increasing efficiency defined as cost per $ of MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) turned up.
3. Ability to scale and handle varying order workloads.
4. Prioritize delivery to turn up consistent MRR amounts.
5. Ability to improve across a broad product portfolio.

However, providers are dealing with technology and environment where:

1. Not everything can be delivered on-demand or automated.
2. Exceptions disrupting regular delivery flow are frequent (no serviceability, construction required, order errors, etc.).
3. Off-net, third-party vendors have various processes/technologies that need to be interfaced with and accommodated in the delivery process.
4. Different products move at different speeds and require different delivery workflows (e.g., access, vs. SD-WAN vs. voice).

Building systems and processes reconciling business requirements with underlying vendors and technologies is a key to successful service delivery.

Measuring service delivery success

The following are the most important telco service delivery KPIs:

Internally measured:

• Average delivery speed / interval (the shorter, the better).
• Variation of expected vs. actual delivery intervals (lower variation indicates consistency in the process).
• Total MRR volume delivered (usually measured monthly).
• Cost per $ of MRR in the delivery process.
• Error rate.

Customer measured:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT) – transactional, measured per each delivery.
• Net-promoter score (NPS) – non-transactional, measured at specific intervals, e.g., through the Customer Portal.

Key service delivery improvements

The following are key service delivery improvements from the IT systems perspective:

Automated deal-to-order

Problems can start before the service delivery process begins – with an order itself. Ensuring that the order is correct, and that what a customer wanted to order is what is passed to service delivery is critical: errors at this stage have a high impact on customer satisfaction, are costly to sort out, and cause significant delivery delays.

To ensure a seamless process from the systems perspective:

• Transition between won deal / opportunity in the CRM / CPQ to service delivery must be automated (and ideally, triggered by customer signature).
• Automation must support complex multi-line orders.
• Quote-to-order must support service Moves, Adds, Changes and Disconnects (MACDs).

Automated order processing kickoff

Telco providers with complicated product portfolios and complex (e.g., large enterprise or wholesale) orders employ an order validation process before passing them down to service delivery.

The validation process is often manual and may cause unnecessary delays if an order is missed. Automated assignment to orders person along with a notification can mitigate the problem.

Additional efficiencies can be gained by routing orders automatically to team members based on their availability, workloads, and skill sets. For example, Nextian Order Management can use process flows or Salesforce Omni-Channel to implement intelligent order routing.

Task automation

A typical telco service delivery process consists of multiple, inter-dependent tasks.

In the ideal world, the delivery process would be 100% automated (“zero touch provisioning”), however in reality, some tasks can be automated and some not. Potential level of automation is highly dependent on a product (e.g., a virtual machine is easy to spin up, access product involving a third-party provider is much more difficult to automate).

Automating as many tasks as possible and reducing the number of manual order touches in the service delivery are paramount to achieving maximum efficiency.

Intelligent task assignments

Depending on provider size, any given time there may be hundreds of manual tasks ready for execution, spanning multiple orders, order types (service turn up/change/disconnect), products, underlying vendors, turning task assignments into a nightmare for service delivery managers.

While the manual tasks themselves cannot be automated, their assignments can. Automated task assignments can be driven off:

• Type of task, product, order, customer,
• Employee availability,
• Current employee workload,
• Employee skills and other factors.

For example, Nextian Order Management can use process flows or Salesforce Omni-Channel to implement intelligent task routing, freeing managers’ time and ensuring that work is assigned in a timely manner.

Automated delivery status reporting & forecasting

Preparing status reports and establishing service projected installation dates (PIDs) can be a time-consuming activity for service delivery managers. This is especially true for providers dealing with large volumes of smaller orders (e.g., broadband Internet) rather than large buildouts such as fiber.

To ensure accuracy, forecasting should be automated and accessible internally for the service delivery teams as well as (in a limited fashion) for customers in the customer portal.

Nextian Order Management fully automates the forecasting process, adjusting delivery dates every time a task is completed, and daily for orders that are not moving. Order status and delivery forecasts are also available in the Customer and Partner portals.

Effective communication

Effective communication (internally as well as with customers and partners) is essential to ensure seamless delivery and high CSAT scores. It is especially important for large enterprise deals (multi-site, multi-service deployments) with a lot of moving parts.

Communication can be improved with email notifications, chatter updates, task alerts as well as with order status updates in the customer portal.

Bi-directional communication, so that customers can post comments and upload files (rather than just consume information) drives additional efficiencies and reduces communication overhead.

Risk management

Managing risks (also referred to as jeopardies in telco) is an underrated aspect of service delivery.

However, risk management is essential for managing customer expectations and (perhaps more importantly) enable measurements allowing service delivery process improvements, identifying:

• Products that cause most trouble to deliver (in numbers but also in affected MRR),
• Steps in the process causing issues,
• Classes of problems (so they can be addressed one by one).

Used in conjunction with customer portals, risk records can be an excellent means of requesting information from customers.

A good risk management process builds customer confidence in provider (issues identified & addressed quickly, provider has a good handle on the delivery process, etc.) leading to high CSAT scores.

Accurate reporting & financial forecasting

Making forward-looking financial projections based on high volumes of in-progress orders of all kinds (new services, changes, disconnects) with ever-changing delivery schedules can be quite challenging.

However accurate service delivery financial forecasts (such as new revenue billed in upcoming months) are required to effectively run the business.

Nextian orders combine forecast and financial information feeding Nextian Business Analytics module providing finance and service delivery managers with up-to-date information in real-time.

Improving Service Delivery with Nextian Quote-to-Cash

Order Management is a primary module handling ordering and service delivery within the Nextian Quote-to-Cash platform. It is integrated with other modules to provide a seamless service delivery experience:

Summary

Software and IT systems play a key role in service delivery, ensuring that:

• Delivery dates and intervals are met.
• Performance is measured and reported.
• Cost of delivery per $ of MRR turned up remains low.
• Error rates are reduced.
• Risks are managed, communicated, and resolved.
• Progress is accurately tracked and communicated: internally, to customers and partners.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT and NPS) scores are high and consistent.

All the above together help drive revenue and customer life-time value.

About Nextian

Nextian offers software products and development services helping cloud & communications providers improve their quote-to-cash to drive revenue growth and customer base retention.

Contact us today to find out how we can help your business grow!