Telstra is Aiming at the “Wow Factor” by Leveraging Customer Pleasing Processes

Imagine transforming a large and dominant Telco player to compete with the agile and small competitors. This is a risky proposition that is happening now because of a customer-focused culture change enabled by an intelligent business process management technology. Top management wants to move to a culture that is committed to customer delight to prove that Telstra is worthy of trust. This means that the CEO and leadership team have been absolutely focused on customer strategy and that strategy started with the roll out of NPS – Net Promoter Score – and advocacy.  In order to get real about it, there is a huge program rolling out underpinned by an assertive process program.  See http://jimsinur.blogspot.com/2013/07/incremental-transformation-is-here-today.html for an explanation of incremental transformation.

The Challenge:

Really understand what customers want and then being able to translate that into specific designable requirements and then improve Teltra’s processes, deliver on what they really – not just their needs, but their wants. This means also then their “wows.”  And that's the way Telstra is going to lead in the marketplace. This “wowing” the customer is really one of the indicators that your process has been successful. This will require measuring customer advocacy.  Peter MacDonald, who is the general manager of Process Excellence at Telstra, says “When you’re scoring a 9 or 10 in advocacy, it’s a tough score. Basically it’s about advocates and detractors and when they say “wow” they are not going to leave. Better yet they are going to tell their friends. That is what’s important. With a fair price and great service, customers are going to say “we paid x and it was really good value””. 

The Solution:  New Goals and an iBPMS:

It is all about what business does and processes are the focus of what gets done. Businesses take inputs and add value through its processes that delivers outcomes and outputs that represent the value of the business. Telstra is concentrating on three major efforts. One is to give visibility to the paths that customers are sent down traversing the complex systems applications to get to desirable outcomes. Another is to build a rollout plan that starts with revenue producing processes such as “order to activation” to drive positive “wows” in the initial steps of the customer relationship cycle and have a plan for taking the relationship through to the whole CRM cycle over the coming years. The third is to deliver processes that surround the existing systems to deliver easy to use, less complex and easy to change processes. This is an ambitious effort and the initial results have been positive to date. 

The Results:

In addition to provide for end to end visibility, workflow automation, case management and solution agility, the following key business outcomes were delivered to help fund the subsequent steps while driving for the “wow” experience:

·        Legacy processes transformed to reduce cycle time by over 70%

·        Time consuming tasks simplified or eliminated

·        Teams consolidated to reduce hand-offs

·        Roles and responsibilities across the service chain clarified and key KPI’s defined

·        Delivering a Real Time Pipeline 

Net; Net:

Customer feedback has been excellent. New streamlined process is helping to win and retain customers. This shows that processes are heart of great CRM while delivering more revenue per hour worked.

This is a highly summarized case study provided by Pegasystems