2009. tmforum, bystriansky

Online Customer Self-Service

Maximizing the Customer Experience

© Emeldi Proprietary, All rights reserved

High Level Summary

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The objective of this presentation is to:

Summarise why it is increasingly more important to maximise the quality of the

customer buying experience over online web channels

Outline what challenges this poses for Telecom IT solutions

Offer suggestions how these challenges should be addressed

Case study of implementation of Fixed / Mobile convergent e-shop in

Telefonica O2, Czech Republic – very first in the region.

The first section covers current market conditions and drivers

demanding online ordering and self-care channels.

The main section deals with the self-care solution challenges

encountered on the way

The last part shows evaluation of realised benefits


Why Customer Experience is important

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Gartner research shows 80% of executives think customer experience is more

important now than three years ago.

A customer can only judge the quality of a company’s products/services based on

inferences made when evaluating the quality of their customer service (customer

experience).


Excellent Customer Experience means…

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Increased loyalty Customers want higher levels of control and access over increased number of

value offers

Their perception of this control is governed by the face (online self-care channel)

The easier, more intuitive the interface, the greater the customer experience

The higher feeling of control they perceive, which all translates to loyalty and

retention

Increased Revenue

The more options which are clearly and easily exposed to the customer the more

revenue will be attained

Prevented churn:

If a customer perceives a lack of control or options they will seek business

elsewhere

68% of Customer defections occur because customers perceive "An

Attitude of Indifference“ . Customer Experience Accounts for Everything.

© Emeldi Proprietary, All rights reserved5

Why anything called “self” makes sense

Market Saturation, stagnating ARPUs, global economic slowdown /

crisis

Telco Operators want to:

reduce cost to operate while maintaining quality of service

increase revenue through differentiation

Telco Customers (end-users) demand:

higher purchasing flexibility (e.g. create their own bundles)

shopping convenience (anytime, anywhere),

highest standards of service delivery

service independence from network (anyhow)

Internet penetration is reaching mass market

Network and service convergence developments

Fertile ground for web-based self-care and web-based shopping


….but

Only reliable, resilient and fault-tolerant web-based solutions

enhance customer experience

Before the arrival of internet, economy customers could only share their experience with the people they knew.

Now, one customer can publish a story about a single bad experience with the touch of a button, all easily accessible to millions of people.

While the internet has been empowering customers, companies have been distancing themselves from them – less face-to-face interactions.

Web-based shopping and self-care is convenient for customers and cost effective for companies, but can be disastrous if something goes wrong…

The probability that something will go wrong with web-based shopping and self-care is very high.


New Telefonica O2 e-shop - Background

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Telefonica O2 Czech Republic is a major Tier 1 operator providing both fixed

and mobile services

Broadband penetration in Czech Republic (2008 figures)

Telefonica O2 Czech Republic, operated several e-shop applications that

were implemented in the former fixed and mobile operators before the

merger in 2006

Technology Subscribers in

000

Percentage

DSL 681 35

TV Cable (CATV) 360 19

CDMA and UMTS 217 11

Wi-Fi and other FWA 572 30

Fiber (FTTx) 100 5

Total 1930 100


New Telefonica O2 e-shop - Background

In 2008, Telefonica O2 initiated a project “Delivery process

improvement” aiming to improve and increase level of automation

and process efficiency for all components of delivery sales

The main business drivers of this effort included:

significantly increase end-to-end process efficiency

increase ratio of activated products out of total orders sent to logistics

shorten total order-to-activation time

improve customer experience

provide a flexible and integrated (fixed-mobile) e-shop front-end,

capable:

of cross-selling / up-selling

targeting specified customer segments


New Telefonica O2 e-shop

- Business Goals

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Offer Fixed, Mobile and FM convergent services over web

channel

Enhance customer experience by offering a personalized and

compelling service.

Longer term take-over target – assume new service activations

from consumers total:

15% postpaid, 25% prepaid,

20% mobile prolongations, 20% transfers,

25% ADSL, 20% O2TV

Reduce dependence on indirect sales channels

Realize savings through dealer commission avoidance (e.g. 10%

postpaid via e-shop translates into annual savings of EUR 1 mil.)


Enticements for customers to go e-shop

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Crazy weeks (special / discounted bundle offers)

Campaign products (LCD TV, MS Office for EUR 15, etc.)

Gifts for free (SMS for free, digital thermometer, etc.)

Direct links from other O2 web portals – to concrete

scenarios, to concrete products, etc.


New Telefonica O2 e-shop – IT Goals

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Replace old version of Mobile e-shop

no content management system

absence of flexible product catalogue, no synchronization

no connection to O2 back-end systems – each order was processed manually

ordering scenarios were not user friendly

Consolidate fixed and mobile web ordering applications and create

one convergent e-shop to support entire portfolio of O2 residential

services

Implement new order management back-end process and integrate

with convergent e-shop

In next phase, connect e-shop solution to self-care portals

(integrated for fixed and mobile services)

Various COTS packages were evaluated, Emeldi was chosen to

deliver application development and systems integration services


Customer self-care solution challenges

Unification of diverse web based portals within Telco operator

system map

Common and centralised framework

Single Sign On (SSO)

Product catalogue issues:

Single vs. distributed

Master / slave principles

Business logic issues

centralized vs. distributed

Solution to contain intuitive and personalized features

Resilience of front-end solution from back-end systems

Solution components to be:

Portable

Vendor independent


Addressing these challenges (1)

Allowing flexibility regarding Enterprise Product Catalogue concept:

Single vs. distributed

Master / slave principles

For lower development costs, and product rollout times, we observed optimal

solution is to design a product catalogue to assume both master and slave

modes simultaneously

some sections of the product catalogue may act as master while others may

import their data from various other external systems

System supports on/off line synchronization

Internal Product Catalogue (Master) retains only data required for support of

functions necessary within the scope of its local business processes.



Allowing flexibility regarding business logic issues

centralized vs. distributed

Solution to contain intuitive and personalized features

Easy navigation, fewer steps to the order

Shopping experience is fun

Solution to support multi-branding

Multi-currency support

Multi-language support



Resilience of front-end solution from back-end systems

Independent from availability of back-end systems

Order parking - possibility to suspend and resume an order during any step


e-shop Integration Architecture

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e-shop Implementation

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The project to re-develop Telefonica O2 e-shop started in June

2008

There were integration challenges along the way

New convergent e-shop was launched in November 2008

It works now as a single ecommerce platform for fixed line services

(e.g. ADSL, IPTV, VAS services, hardware) and mobile services

(e.g. phones, tariff plans, data plans, hardware, mobile VAS

services, contract extension, mobile number portability)


….and some e-shop statistics

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Average number of completed fix orders doubled

Average number of completed GSM orders increased by 50%

Telefonica O2, Czech Republic has about 150 stone shops, e-

shop produces about 15-20% of daily orders (it means it replaces

30 stone shops)

Peak hours / days

10 am - 11 am (15% of all orders),

5 pm - 6 pm (20% of all order)

Peak during week: Monday (18% of all finished orders)

0,29% of all orders that are going online are rejected by the back-

end Order Management system


Summary messages

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Current market condition and technological advancements create

a fertile ground for web-based self-care and web-based shopping

Web is an important ordering and customer-care channel with

numerous opportunities to enhance the customer experience

It works anytime and anywhere

Web can not only serve customers, but also dealers and even

stone shops

…but the probability that something goes wrong with web-based

shopping and self-care is very high

Only reliable, resilient and fault-tolerant web-based solutions

enhance customer experience


Thank you for your attention

For questions and/or more information please contact

[email protected]

+420 777 813 317