Telenor: New Customer Information and Service Capabilities

A portal solution based on Oracle Siebel has reduced the time to enter and validate orders from 10 days to just three minutes.

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Telenor Networks is the leading supplier of fixed network services in the Norwegian telecommunications market.

To maximize market share and achieve high performance in the face of intense competition, combined with a shift from voice services to growing demands for xDSL services, Telenor has been moving aggressively to migrate from a line-switched platform to package-switched IP-based services, enabling the company to provide fast, dependable, high-bandwidth content services for its customers.

Telenor faced a number of challenges related to increasing number of orders and the cost of processing these from both a process and technology standpoint. As Einar Eriksen, systems manager, Telenor Networks, explains, the company lacked the appropriate business processes to successfully combat these competitive threats and efficiently meet customer needs. "In order to take advantage of the forecasted explosive growth in demand for next-generation services over the next five years, we needed to completely change the way we engaged our customers," he says. Telenor lacked the infrastructure and customer information needed to provide superior customer service and drive customer loyalty. Wholesale service orders, for instance, could only be received by phone, mail or fax, and required considerable manual order entry. With so many touchpoints in the process, the potential for error was high. The company needed between five and 10 days to enter and validate each order, leading to a considerable backlog of orders.

The company was also challenged to understand its performance against service-level agreements (SLAs) with customers relying on data from spreadsheets, which in turn is derived from information residing in the data warehouse, which might itself be several days old. Telenor Networks had visibility into open service requests, but found it difficult to understand the percentage of orders delivered on time, versus the numbers that were delayed.

Based on a close existing relationship, and on deep technology and industry experience, Telenor Networks turned to Accenture in order to deliver the new customer information and service capabilities that could drive high performance for the company.

Telenor Networks recognized that one of its strongest competitive assets was customer knowledge and that this knowledge needed to be channeled throughout the organization to transform the customer service experience, exploit selling opportunities and maximize efficiency. The company also needed a solution appropriate for the unique wholesale environment, where the volume of transactions is high, but the number of customers is low. To deliver maximum business value while holding costs down, the delivery team determined that an online customer portal was the ideal solution, one based on Oracle's Siebel CRM for Communications and Oracle Business Analytics. The online wholesale portal was delivered in only four months.

Today, thanks to this solution, when one of Telenor's 100-plus wholesale customers needs to order a service, such as extra bandwidth, the customer can now place the order directly online with Telenor Networks. The system automates the entire order management process. Wholesale customers can use the customer Web portal to check the status of their orders, schedule installation appointments, view the status of trouble tickets, install base (asset) and access historical and current invoices.

With the new portal and the underlying customer information infrastructure, approximately 300 Telenor Networks sales, sales support, customer service, billing and service management professionals now share a common, unified view of complete customer information. All sales opportunities, account details, contacts, orders, quotes, service requests, trouble tickets and invoices are available in several easy-to-navigate screens.

Telenor has significantly advanced toward high performance thanks to the new customer portal. The company has reduced the time necessary to enter and validate an order from 10 days to just three minutes.

The enhanced responsiveness of the new solution has enabled the company to increase the number of orders processed each week from 400 to 10,000. Up to 98 percent of all wholesale customer orders are now processed online. The portal has also been warmly welcomed by Telenor's wholesale customers only two hours of training on the system is necessary in order to use the portal effectively. Customers are benefiting from timely, accurate response to service requests. Also, through the portal, Telenor has equipped the wholesale customers with a toolkit to diagnose the faulty lines, resulting in cost reduction for Telenor Networks and improved customer satisfaction for the wholesale customers. More complex inquiries can be automatically escalated to the appropriate team for rapid, seamless dissemination and resolution.

"A partner portal provides the gateway to resolving many customer issues, which has reduced the number of calls and e-mails to the call center and allowed us to be more responsive," says Eriksen. "When customers need to speak to Telenor Networks, they now know their inquiry will be immediately acted upon by a knowledgeable agent using optimized business processes."

The Accenture solution also includes an intelligent dashboard of management data that is helping Telenor steer the company more effectively. Based on Oracle Business Analytics, the dashboard is being used by 40 sales and product management staff to provide an intelligent, detailed view of management information, including the number of offers made over a particular period, the products being ordered each day, their volume and their value. This information is available individually to staff as well as on a large plasma screen in the sales department.

Accenture research into the characteristics of high-performance businesses has underscored the importance of delivering a consistent, branded experience at every point of customer contact. With the online portal and customer information infrastructure from Accenture, Telenor Networks has significantly advanced toward high performance.

According to Eriksen, "Thanks to Accenture and Siebel, we now have the infrastructure and customer information needed to deliver great service and improve customer loyalty."