Get a handle on Order-to- Activate Framework

Vinay Firake

By Vinay Firake 

Most businesses design and run processes from marketing to customer acquisition for order fulfilment or service activation. This is followed by service assurance, bill generation and collection. There could be minor variants but the processes are typical. Consider the telecom service provider business. The process, from when a customer places an order to when the provider activates the service may take weeks, depending on the product, location, access and a whole list of parameters.

Even before the billing process is activated, there are multiple processes which need to be taken care of. Customer identities need to be validated, the order must be handed over to the operations team, equipment and component provisioning must be done, followed by installation, service configuration and finally the quality checks. However, if we look at the same process from the customers’ viewpoint, the journey leaves a lot to be desired. For example, it is unrealistic to expect customers to wait for two weeks for the service to start.

Can the service provider reduce the two weeks required for service activation to two days or even lesser? If this can be done, it will greatly improve customer experience, especially in the early stages of the engagement. The service provider also gets to book his revenue from that customer a full two weeks earlier than usual. It is a win-win situation. So, where is the snag?

The problem is co-ordination with the dozens of units within an enterprise in order to provision First Time Right, which can result in lesser resources, faster revenue realization and improved customer experience.

As a consequence, enterprises undertake a number of transformations focusing on eradicating complications that hinder efficient provisioning. These fall into four categories:

 Simplification: It is possible to improve processes and workflows using Six Sigma and Lean. Better knowledge management can result in faster processing and improved data entry methodologies together with a little digitization can add to improvements. Industry statistics reveal that enterprises began using quality disciplines and data-driven approaches about a decade ago – often delivering a 5%-7% improvement.

 Automation: Simplifying applications and bringing a more integrated approach improve operations by several notches with accurate decision-making. More recently, Robotics is being deployed to automate some of the processing. This has certainly yielded benefits in efficiencies as well as accuracy.

 Analytics/ Intelligence: Automation has made more data available for analysis. Analytical approaches, if deployed effectively, can provide tremendous insights into business operations, but more importantly improve customer experience.

Immersive Customer Experience: Today, the focus is on deploying technology for personalized and rich immersive experiences across customers, employees, agents, partners and activities. In this new connected world, it is essential to provide consistent experience across multiple customer interaction channels. Hence, there are a variety of omni-channel solutions that enterprises are deploying. Not just this, but customer empowerment has become a necessity with significant increase in internet proliferation.

It is normal for enterprises to undertake each of the above sequentially and gradually over time . It is equally natural for them to apply the improvements in isolation – say within a marketing process for inventory management or customer management.

In 80% of instances, the focus of an enterprise is on solving problems without looking at upstream or downstream impact. For example, if collections are an issue, most enterprises would focus on providing customers with reminders, presenting timely and simplified bills, increasing the payment options or providing incentives for timely payment. They may fail to look upstream at the billing cycle where the origin of the problem may continue to persist.

Creating holistic intervention

The trick is to create an intervention that examines end-to-end processes by placing a wrapper around upstream and downstream functions. When you think about this, it requires a complex framework to deploy all four levels of transformation (listed above), map every process within an enterprise, understand their relationships, define requirements and problems at each stage and plot them to connect with actions and solutions that are automatically deployed. Now, think about integrating this into a single view using technology for exponential transformation.

To further use the example from telecom, this would mean automating the complete fulfillment process. When an order is picked up, it pulls in data from different channels into a workflow and breaks it down into fulfilment steps. Using technology, the enterprise has the ability to see which step is successful – and which is failing. It then automatically triggers an appropriate intervention to correct the failure. As an additional layer to meet enterprise goals, the system uses customer satisfaction and faster path-to-revenue as the drivers to prioritize the interventions.

Challenges and way forward

The idea of an integrated fulfilment solution does look simple – and in effect it is. However, it has been noted that while implementing an Order to Activate (O2A) framework, nearly half of the customers don’t even derive 50% of the expected ROI, and are disappointed with the transformation initiative. About 30-40% of customers say their initiatives get delayed because of the changing business scenario. Another 45% say they have over-shot their budgets.

In many instances, providers do not have the complete range of domain specific solutions. To complicate matters further, IT teams are unable to reach an agreement on solutions. Therefore, it is no surprise that results don’t meet business requirements.

An effective way to overcome these challenges and secure the expected ROI is by opting for a 100% risk-reward commercial model. This can eliminate the risk of failure. But of course, this works only when the technology partner is qualified, experienced, understands your domain and has the required accelerators to meet your business goals.

The transformation encompassing business process simplification, automation, generation of insights and providing an immersive customer experience is urgent. With the emergence of the digital economy, consumers have started to demand services across data and voice. They want enterprise-grade services to be delivered anytime, anywhere and on any device. Telecom service providers need to remain agile, lean and proactive, to cater to these demands. Staying aligned with customer expectations is not an option, it is a necessity.

(The author Vinay Firake is Vice President & Global Head – Communications, Media &Network Equipment Provider (NEP) business, Business Process Services (BPS) at Wipro Limited. He currently operates from London.)

vndedit@cybermedia.co.in