Ricky Mortimer from O2 Business explains how leveraging Cloud software has helped develop a new sales and service platform for multi-channel customer experience.
With 22m customers, O2 is one of the UK’s leading providers of communication services and proud of its mobile heritage, but today mobile is just one part of its offering. O2 UK now provides an extensive range of fixed and mobile, voice and data communications services and it has entered a number of new markets including ehealth, mobile wallet, IT services and media on your mobile.
O2 Business is evolving and transforming within the market in which it operates. The organisation’s strategy, Joined-up Business, is centred on helping British businesses get the most out of their ICT. Joined up Business is about joining up customers’ communications, their IT, people and companies to customers.
Joined-up approach
Along with the evolving and changing needs of its customers, the strategy is the catalyst for O2 Business to drive change from within to further improve its customer experience whilst driving out costs within its core operating model. To underpin its vision and plans, the company decided to develop a multi-channel, multi-product sales and service platform and partnered with CloudSense to help build a new sales and service platform that will enable O2 to join up with its customers, channels, employees and partners.
Ricky Mortimer, E-Enablement programme manager at O2 Business, explains: “We want to encourage fresh thinking and new possibilities for our company and were therefore looking for a technology solution that would support us on that journey. Fast-changing technology presents new opportunities but it also means fresh business challenges, such as streamlining and speeding up our processes, making the most of our IT infrastructure and handling ever-growing amounts of data while controlling costs and maintaining service levels.
“Rising to these challenges means that we needed to eliminate manual processes to improve efficiency and better connect customers with staff to create a joined-up social enterprise. We knew that if we could achieve these objectives, we could significantly speed up our time-to-market for new products and services while also enhancing our responsiveness to customers and the market. We also believe as a company that if we can implement these kinds of changes in our business, we can learn and pass on this experience and expertise to our customers.”
O2 Business was looking for a company which could support O2’s business goals and which offered a Cloud computing based model to reflect the company’s Joined up Business strategy. Other important objectives were reducing development costs and time-to-market. The ideal vendor would also provide opportunities to accelerate innovation and unique go-to-market propositions for O2 UK and would run a 100% native Salesforce environment.
Cloud solutions
The deployment saw CloudSense (CS) integrate its Order Management stack into the Salesforce platform. Including applications such as CS ClickApprove, CS Configurator and CS Orchestrator, the solution was designed to help O2 Business extend its lead prospect capabilities to include its product catalogue, order management and its price and quoting engine. Using the CloudSense stack, O2 Business can now carry out electronic approval for contracts and enable end-to-end fulfilment through the Cloud.
With CloudSense, O2 Business has improved the efficiency of its core operating model and business processes and can now automate its sales to cash process, reducing the lead-to-cash sales cycle by introducing a higher degree of accuracy. The solution has helped O2 create an improved online shopping experience for customers and extend capabilities to partners by allowing them to order new services and make changes. Giving its partners the best tools available means they can develop a compelling service offering in line with the O2 UK brand promise.
The solution also enabled O2 Business to create new platforms for its customers. Mortimer explains: “As our customers evolve and change their buying and service expectations, we have been able to increase our responsiveness and provide a better online experience as a result of the implementation.
“Now we can manage additional complexity effectively and get more out of infrastructure, enhancing the customer experience in a way that means that the organisation is able to grow profitably. At the same time the solution has enabled O2 Business to drive out cost from its core business processes.”
Looking ahead
Looking to the future, O2 Business plans to launch more capabilities and add more process automation as the business continues to grow and diversify its product and service offering. As Mortimer explains: “This is perhaps the biggest benefit of the solution – it enables us to add more capabilities as and when we want to, meaning we can ensure our order processes keep pace as we evolve as a business.
“For us this is essential as it means we will be able to keep finding operational efficiencies well into the future as we grow. We can keep our focus on the business, knowing that the right technology platform is in place to support any changes we make.”
