Leverage process orchestration framework to achieve faster integration with partner service providers and improve operational efficiency

Businesses in the Connectedness industry are actively looking to expand their roots into the untapped fiber market. And to do so, most of them prefer to go with off-net services, i.e., leasing network infrastructure from a partner service provider. It enables quick and cost-efficient customer acquisition for establishing a larger footprint.

As per the annual report of a leading full fiber operator in the UK, off-net revenues account for 50% of their total revenue. Therefore, service providers must overcome the challenges that hinder them from supporting lean off-net operations and improving customer satisfaction.

Service providers in the off-net space face the following challenges:

• Integration with multiple partner service providers is complex, time-consuming (18+ months for each integration), and expensive
• Lack of visibility into the partner service provider’s network leading to disjointed operations
• Lack of transparency across E2E process management, leading to multiple follow-ups
• Increase in Tail order processing cycle time (i.e., order processing time by partner service provider)
• Significant manual processes owing to the dependency on the partner service provider
• Lack of standardized processes and a unified way of handling the orders/cases

The above challenges call for a complete transformation of the off-net services. Use the off-net process orchestration framework that acts as a central orchestrator to bridge the gap between service providers and partner service providers. It reduces operation costs by 56% while providing better control and visibility into E2E processes. Experience 3X faster integration with partner service providers using the framework.

The key ingredients of the framework are:

• Simple interface aggregation: Use an interface aggregation platform to enable quick integration with the partner service provider and accelerate fiber adoption
• Unified task orchestration: Create an end-to-end process flow map to get a complete view of the order and issue status
• Point-to-point ticketing: Integrate customer self-service with automated troubleshooting. Use bots to raise tickets directly with the partner service providers
• Off-net SLA governance and reporting: Drive partner service provider-specific SLAs with automated follow-ups and real-time reports on aging and penalty metrics

Leverage RPA for Mobile Number Porting with lesser workforce and time, ensuring resolution at the first instance

Mobile Number Portability (MNP) is a facility which allows subscribers to retain their phone numbers even after switching operators, services, or locations. MNP implementation started in the late 1990s in mature European markets like The Netherlands and UK. It offers favorable benefits to customers like lifelong ownership of the number, better services due to increased competition and efficient mobile number planning & administration. But this comes at a cost to the operator with minimal impact on customer – setup cost, maintenance cost, and call routing cost.

All Call Query is the most widely used mechanism of MNP and is the most efficient method for large, interconnected networks. It’s a direct routing scheme which makes use of a centralized number portability database (CNPDB). The process is highly efficient as the donor operator is nowhere involved in the entire scenario.

Figure 1: All Call Query- Mechanism of number porting

Service providers often have to fetch orders from multiple customer portals, making it one of the biggest challenges in MNP. As a result, the process becomes more cumbersome and complex. Moreover, the process requires high manual intervention, making it prone to errors and reducing efficiency. Service Providers must embrace RPA to overcome these challenges. Using RPA, they can:

• Fetch orders from multiple portals
• Search and aggregate data from various web and Citrix-based applications
• Automate order entry in legacy applications

Automate processes and achieve faster ROI with full-featured RPA

Employing staff is the biggest operating expense for service providers in the Connectedness industry. Employees are also their greatest asset. Automation technology advances enable service providers with new ways to maximize employee productivity, revenue, and customer satisfaction while minimizing human error. One of those advances is robotic process automation (RPA), a broad, deep category of tools for automating business, network, and operational processes.

RPA can automate mundane processes which are tiring and boring for a human to do all day long – the kind of fatigue that results in mistakes and expensive turnover. By providing what customers seek faster than a live agent can, RPA eliminates one of their major complaints: wasting minutes on hold to speak with an agent or hours or days for a work order to be processed manually. The big advantages delivered by RPA are customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, greater revenues and profits, security, and reliability. But the biggest obstacle to achieving these ends through RPA misunderstands how and where it can be deployed. This insight, sponsored by Prodapt and published by TM Forum, elaborates on how to embrace RPA across the business processes to achieve greater efficiencies, improved customer experience, and faster ROI.

Leverage AI/ML to enhance the efficiency of your day-to-day business operations and improve customer experience

Today’s digital-savvy customers demand advanced and ultra-rich experiences. Therefore, factors like service availability, turnaround time, and quality of service (QoS) are becoming increasingly important. But the question remains how can Service Providers bridge the huge gap that currently exists between customer demands and their fulfillment?

Service providers’ current infrastructure and service delivery approach are unable to match up with customer expectations. There is a dire need to enhance their key operational areas such as customer service, service assurance and network automation.

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning (AI/ML) technology, with its recent advancements, is fast becoming the choice of service providers to bridge this gap and improve operational efficiency. AI/ML systems, together with Bigdata, can process huge amounts of historical and real-time data from various systems such as CRM, billing systems, NMS/EMS, and product catalogues to provide actionable insights and predictions.

Service providers must adopt AI/ML solutions in their infrastructure to offer next-generation services and experiences.

• Intelligent software-defined approach for operations and delivery of services (virtualization, self-healing, and self-learning networks)
• Automation of customer service and customer experience improvement (chatbots, virtual assistants)
• Predictive maintenance and agile operations (automated problem detection, troubleshooting, and optimization of networks)
• Innovation in subscriber profiling, usage analysis, and personalized offers

Use proven tools and techniques to improve the efficiency of Technical Assistance Center (TAC), reduce inbound repeat calls and customer trouble tickets

Today, telecommunication is no longer limited to voice. In the past few years, the industry has rapidly grown to accommodate multiple services. In this era of multi-play, service providers in the connectedness industry are adding various services to their catalog, such as voice, messaging, broadband, IPTV, DTH, VAS etc. And to support these services, service providers have technical assistance centers (TACs) to help customers resolve issues related to specific services.

However, service providers have been facing challenges in maintaining and improving the efficiency and productivity of TACs as much of their efforts go into non-value-adding (NVA) tasks causing resource wastage. NVA tasks can be classified into following categories:

Figure : NVA Waste Classification

Further analysis of NVAs (over-processing, rework, waiting, etc.) shows that managing a high volume of inbound repeat calls and tickets and operating with distributed tools are the major challenges of a TAC.

To mitigate these challenges, service providers must explore innovative and field-proven tools and techniques, including robot-assisted screening, Proactive Network Analyzer etc. By implementing these techniques, service providers can easily realize a 30- 40% reduction in inbound repeat calls and customer trouble tickets.