A Telco’s CX Transformation Powered by Tech and Data

Following a merger, a European telco wanted to dial up its customer centricity as part of an ambitious digital transformation. Keen to challenge the largest competitor in its market, the company determined that radically improved customer journeys would provide some much-needed differentiation.

We supported EuroCo* with a comprehensive approach spanning five critical areas:

• Define the company’s digital mission, and determine how much value it could capture (as measured by operating free cash flow).
• Create a new taxonomy for redesigned customer journeys, and establish a digital factory that can tackle these redesign efforts efficiently across the  end-to-end life cycle (sales, onboarding, care, etc.).
• Develop an Agile operating model for the new digital unit that encompasses Agile teams, staffing, and governance and that is supported by enablers and centers of excellence.
• Build the EuroCo teams’ skills in Agile, human-centered design, data analytics, and other capabilities needed to advance its digital ambition.
• And critically, review and improve the underlying IT architecture that will power the digital transformation, which is an often overlooked part of such projects.

EuroCo approached this from the customer’s point of view: What would the company have to do for customers to agree that they received the best possible customer experience (CX) for any need they had? Success would come in the form of a higher Net Promoter Score℠, lower churn, purchases of additional products/services, and similar outcomes. We worked with EuroCo to create Agile teams in sales, onboarding, in-life care, customer life cycle management, and data science—dedicated cross-functional teams that drive improvements end to end.

Customer journey redesign began with a careful delineation of the taxonomy of customer actions across different life cycles: explore, buy, pay bill, manage account, and more—10 in all. Once those were identified, we helped EuroCo prioritize them based on business value and customer satisfaction impact, which revealed that onboarding was the journey to focus on first. We broke that journey into discrete episodes and applied a battle-proven Agile process to redesign it. We then followed a similar process for other customer journeys, including in-life care and sales, applying a human-centered lens and a strong emphasis on cocreation with customers and stakeholders. An iterative prototyping and testing process quickly produced tangible results.

We also helped the newly merged entity create an operating model that spelled out clear responsibilities for the digital teams and the other parts of the organization, and we provided training on Agile, human-centered design, and other essential capabilities that EuroCo’s digital transformation required.

IT architecture: the foundation of digital success

No company can hope to embrace digital and redesign CX at scale without the right IT architecture in place. As we worked with EuroCo, we assessed 20 dimensions of their current architecture and identified six critical domains to prioritize: digital channels, integration/application programming interfaces, customer relationship management, order management, e-commerce, and customer communication.

We mapped a clear plan to address these domains in an Agile way so that the company has the IT architecture it needs to support the scaling of its digital unit and customer journeys. We also identified a critical short-term gap in the in-house skills that EuroCo possessed and mapped initiatives that can address them. Longer term, we helped the company create a plan that will improve its data and analytics capabilities and support greater modularity and adaptability.

At a more granular level, we helped the company identify and prioritize critical IT capabilities for each of the customer journeys it intended to focus on. For example, regarding the “explore and buy” journey, we highlighted more than a dozen domains spanning front-end systems and processes; business, operations and enterprise resource planning support; and IT solutions. This detailed analysis enabled the company to attack the specific areas required to bring “explore/buy” to a new level.

Addressing the IT architecture issues required to redesign CX at scale is a complex, multiyear journey, but it’s a vital component of a digital transformation—one that often gets overlooked or under-resourced.

Already, EuroCo is beginning to see the results of its efforts. The company is on track to achieve:

• gains in digital sales and cross-selling opportunities;
• a reduction in preinstallation churn;
• a massive reduction in onboarding calls; and
• a substantial reduction in service calls

Together these and other improvements equate to a more than $100 million gain in run-rate benefits, elevating EuroCo’s competitive posture in an increasingly competitive market.

* We take our clients' confidentiality seriously. While we've changed their names, the results are real.

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks, and Net Promoter Score℠, NPSx℠, and Net Promoter System℠ are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.