Introduction
The telecommunications industry in the Philippines has been undergoing an unprecedented phase of growth and expansion – thanks to the growth of the outsourcing industry in the country, steady growth in the country’s economy, and aggressive infrastructure investments from the industry players. During the decade of 2011-2020, the industry experienced remarkable progress and transformation.
About the Client
The client is a leading telecommunications company in the Philippines with a mission to transform and enrich lives through communications. It offers various commercial wireless services through its 2G, 3G, 3.5G HSPA+, 4G LTE, and LTE-A networks. Operating the largest mobile network in the country, as well as one of the largest fixed-line and broadband networks, the company has established itself as a frontrunner in the industry. Notably, the client has achieved remarkable success in building a large and diverse subscriber base across the country. As of the end of 2022, the company serves an impressive 86.7 million mobile subscribers.
Context and Problem
Amidst the breakneck speed at which the industry has grown since the start of the decade, in terms of user base, RPU, data consumption, etc., the company set its goal on prioritizing customer retention and improving the revenue per user to ensure its growth sustainability. This is easier said than done, given the number of levers that need to be managed. After significant deliberation, the company identified enhanced customer experience as the real actionable target to chase.
Prioritizing the broadband business (given its growth projections), the company decided to dive deep and understand the underlying parameters that need to be addressed in order to achieve a better customer experience. Against this backdrop, the company decided to embark on a journey with a reliable team of process experts.
The company was faced with the challenge of initiating and completing a detailed assessment of the current state within the selected business vertical and its affiliated processes within a short time to ensure there are quick and timely actions. This required a team of unbiased, experienced, and articulative process consultants who can assess, assimilate, and articulate improvement opportunities across the business.
Solution
ECCI’s prior good experience and working relationship with the company, the industry expertise and knowledge of global best practices, and flexibility to deploy and initiate the project with limited time led the company to select us as the partner in this process improvement journey.
The ECCI team embarked on the study by clustering the 100+ processes within the customer lifecycle into 7 major tracks. The team then built a current state assessment framework to analyze the company’s existing customer experience journey through three key lenses.
- Efficiency deduced from the number of efficiency barriers or wastes identified in the process
- Effectiveness through the determination of Process Maturity Index
- Metrics through Metrics Effectiveness Index
While the efficiency analysis was built around the Lean principles and the concept of 7 types of wastes, the effectiveness and metrics-related indices were developed taking into account several aspects, including process definition and documentation, implementation status, and monitoring interventions. Of particular importance was the team’s extension of the findings and analysis into potential recommendations categorized under four thematic areas, namely – Customer Experience, System Improvement, Cost Optimization, and Automation Opportunity. This made the recommendations real, relevant, actionable, and, most importantly, objective.
The team deconstructed each process and analyzed them through the 3 lenses, identified opportunities for improvement/recommendations, and consolidated them back at the track level. In addition, each track was assigned a maturity score, derived as a function of all the findings and performance of the processes within the tracks.
As part of the engagement, the team also redrafted the entire process flow to represent the value chain within the business through a detailed process map at the track and process level, making it viable for the company to take scalable actions when it comes to process improvement – including exploring automation solutions.
Challenges and Success Factors
While the project approach and intervention helped achieve the planned objectives, it was not without several challenges along the way. Below are some notable ones with key success factors that helped the team overcome those effectively:
- Getting the support and buy-in from the process owners. There was a combination of lack of time and restricted belief among the process owners, given competing priorities and the mindset that the current processes are working well. The project addressed this challenge by prioritizing early adopters from certain teams and producing showcases of the outputs to build trust among the others.
- Meeting the objectives within a constrained timeline. The team identified early the need to work in parallel streams, given the short timeline. In order to manage this, a simple playbook that included basic tools, templates, and protocols was prepared, and an orientation was facilitated for the core teams on both sides (ECCI and the company) to avoid misalignment, limit rework, and optimize man-days.
- Keeping the findings and recommendations objective. Doing work in parallel streams with consultants having varying expertise and process owners having different maturity levels in terms of the processes they manage brings about the challenge of subjective inputs leading to vague analysis and unsatisfactory recommendations. This was largely addressed by creating meaningful buckets/categories for these topics and following up the process owner meetings with regular alignment stand-ups among consultants for debriefing.
Benefits and Impact
The engagement not only met the planned objectives but also set in motion a journey for further performance improvement. Below are some key business benefits that can be attributed to this project:
- Objective and refined process flow with a clear understanding of the business value chain, providing the right platform for the Broadband business to scale right.
- Aligned set of improvement areas that process owners and leaders can commit to.
- Clear call-outs of recommendations categorized by timeline (short-term, mid-term, and long-term).
- Established setup for a management system approach to take over, providing not just process documentation and improvement ideas but ensuring the mechanisms for monitoring.
Get in Touch
If you need help improving the customer experience for your organization, get in touch with us today and learn how our team of experts can help you.
To start your journey, simply contact us and book your free advisory session. Want to know more about how we can help? Check out our website for all the info.
