​If you are wondering how to improve operational excellence in the telecom industry, you have come to the right place. The process of establishing a customer-centric culture requires more than just focusing on customer service. 

​Customer-centricity is a business enabler, allowing companies to increase their margins and create value for shareholders. In order to implement a customer-centric culture, companies must focus on all aspects of customer experience.

In order to achieve this, companies must focus on identifying and eliminating inefficiencies, which is just as important as spotting gains. The first step is to identify manual processes, remove silos, and surface relevant data. Automating and standardizing processes can help companies eliminate wastes, while also reducing costs. Operational Excellence revolves around business outcomes, so it requires a top-down view of the initiatives to drive success. Robust reporting is necessary to gauge the results and improve performance.
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Checkout- Top Ten Strategic Decision-Making Tools for Operational Excellence

One of the first steps in creating an efficient and effective organizational culture is empowering team members. Empowering employees helps them to think outside the box. By involving employees in decision-making and incorporating their feedback, teams are more likely to come up with innovative solutions that can increase revenue or lower costs. Employee empowerment will help teams focus on their goals and maximize their knowledge. The goal of operational excellence is to make the process efficient, reliable, and repeatable.

To achieve this, companies must focus on accountability, problem solving, and teamwork. This proactive attitude starts from the top, trickling down to the bottom. Investing in training, flexible work policies, and competitive employee benefits packages can help. Similarly, the aviation industry continues to invest in operational excellence. Major airlines are making improvements in maintenance programs, staff training, and SOPs to ensure that their operations remain safe and productive.

Implementing Operational Excellence involves establishing targets at every level of the business. Each level should have its own goals. Project managers should have profits-based targets for billable work, while Operations teams should have KPIs that roll into them. Developing a culture of accountability and transparency is vital in operational excellence initiatives. If people are afraid to report mistakes or report problems, they won't be willing to accept the improvements.

Operational excellence requires employee engagement. To ensure that employees are willing to share data, employees must be incentivized to share this information. Timesheets, for example, deliver vital information, but they're hated by employees. Developing alternatives to timesheets removes the pain points and poor morale of manual work. If these efforts don't improve operational excellence in telecom, the company's bottom line will suffer.
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The principles of operational excellence are rooted in several management theories and practices. The most popular operational excellence framework was developed by fourteen leading European CEOs in 1988. They developed a methodology that enabled businesses to become more competitive, improve productivity and identify gaps. The concept has since inspired efforts in many nations. Since then, hybrid models have emerged, combining elements of EFQM and Baldrige. 

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Continuing on the SWOT analysis (from part 1), market research highlights few main problems with the sales and marketing processes within telecos namely-
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1. OTT (over- the- top) players are growing quickly in comparison with traditional fixed and mobile communication services.
2. Many years of M&A (mergers and acquisition) have left telecos with disjointed systems that rely on outdated processes.
3. 77% of C-level executives from telecos state employee skill-gaps as a hindrance to driving digital transformation.
4. Decentralized customer data.
5. In-sufficient customer loyalty and appreciation for telecom products & services.
6. Sloppy customer care.
7. Lack of system updates for fully complying to GDPR and other regulations.
8. Not seeing problems from a customer’s perspective.

 
There are practical challenges to new ways of working- for example- how to reconcile the agile approach with long budget or approval cycles?

​I recommend 9 front solution for making telecos sales and marketing process improvement goal into reality:

1. Build right teams: Choosing the right core team members is crucial. They need to be advocates who exhibit energy, strong curiosity, pragmatism and entrepreneurial spirit within the teams. Moving some of the organization’s best resources into agile squads can be challenging, but it is key to ensuring ownership on subsequent levels, including education and participation in the design and execution stages.


2. Employee training & Anchor hires: The transformation towards next-generation customer engagement requires deep digital talent for a set of new roles such as data architects, marketing and digital advertising specialist. Existing staff probably won’t be able to perform all roles, so training and external recruitment will ne needed. External recruiting will require anchor hires i.e. hire one developer and his/her colleagues will follow.

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3. Recruitment process redesign: New recruitment processes via digital networking events, dedicated recruiting days etc. to attract the right prospects. The approach of recruiting itself can also help build a brand and bring in the best people. The types of talent telecos need are attracted to forward-thinking companies, so recruiting culture matters. Having the right company representatives give the right talks at the right types of conferences at which talent can be found is one such method. Moreover, this also improves the hiring manager’s career aspirations and goals. Involving key team members in the entire hiring process is another must-do. This method can ensure that recruiters are completely on board with the goal of transformation and can effectively convey that message.  

Note: Transitions on this level almost always require some external support in the beginning. But as the capabilities become cores of the business model, those roles should be converted to internal ones in a six-to-nine months time frame to ensure the new culture is embedded and a lower cost base achieved.

​4. Multi-disciplinary teams: Traditional telecos tend to be highly siloed, often marketing and sales team working separately. This results in slow processes and low customer centricity, which is no longer sustainable. While it can take weeks and many back-and-forth handoffs to do something like put together a new discount campaign, working across functions in multidisciplinary teams can shorten the time to market for a new campaign to just days. This plus agile working methods is what accelerates digital customer engagement and can increase revenues by as much as 16%.  

To achieve this faster, targeted and dynamic approach, multidisciplinary teams need to bring together the consumer-functions and IT groups to ensure the latter isn’t left behind. Together, they should focus on ambitious, short-term minimum viable products that follow a data-driven test and learn methodology. A Design Thinking approach, Agile project management and empowered product developers to take appropriate decisions, facilitates fast-prototyping.
 
Since impact can be achieved by even a small team, the proven approach is to start with select proof-of-concept use cases, followed by a rapid rollout to wider organization.
 
The multidisciplinary teams must have end-to-end ownership mind-set. Rather than waiting for orders or permission to act or submit long change request documents, teams should be empowered to take responsibility and get their work done.


5. Strong flexible technical foundation: To succeed in digital customer engagement, the agile processes and mind-set must be complemented by a strong technical foundation that will increase execution power and channel reach, as well as enable new cases. Failure to resource effectively and invest upfront can leave teams without the tools and technology required to unlock next-generation opportunities, such as personalization at scale.

​Unlocking these use cases will require four elements to work together effectively – data, decision-making, design and distribution. Using Lean’s ’pull’ methodology will minimize the wait to build technology sophistication and digital maturity. Regardless of technology maturity, telecos can and should invest in technology enablers e.g. Google analytics, Tag Manager, Onsite AIS testing etc. to drive growth in marketing and digital sales.  


6. Overcome inflexible legacy systems: Shun duplicative layers of approval and restrictions on open-source tools. Also, traditional players lack the basic technology needed to achieve encouraging results rapidly. This includes tracking basic marketing tools and flexible IT to allow for better customer flows. Getting the technology foundation implemented quickly is critical to managing the low flexibility of legacy systems many of which are partially disjointed as a result of years of industry M&A.  


7. Corral data early: Customer data in telecos are usually found spread throughout the enterprise and have not been centralized in a single repository where they can be made available across channels. Developing a plan that priorities use cases and build a single source of customer insights for these use cases is critical. As the number of use cases expand, the data platform should continuously add more data signals as required. This will empower marketing activities and enable a consistent customer communication across digital and physical channels.  


8. Update data protection compliance to regulations: The complexity of privacy assessments and the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) require extensive analysis that can cause delays. At an early stage, companies need to identify areas that will handle personal data and assess whether these areas are affected by the GDPR or other integrity requirements. Furthermore, they need to define ways to use available data not covered by these restrictions.  


​9. Make Lean Kaizen a daily habit: Lean Kaizen is a method of improvement that involves a continuous process in order to get rid of excess waste involved in a  process. Kaizen is the foundation of lean methods of production and focuses largely on reducing, or completely eliminating waste, increasing productivity and attaining continuous improvement relating to an organization’s methods. 
 
Lean Kaizen incorporates Kaizen’s ideal of continuous improvement and focuses on making and applying small changes for a significant amount of time in order to achieve desired results. This method involves all types of employees at different levels within the company and requires complete involvement by all parties in order to allow anyone to speak up regarding problems and ways of improvement. 

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This is definitely is an exciting time for telecos because of rising opportunities to collaborate for growth. Telecos can be best partners to any government, city or local administration. Together they can not only solve connectivity problems but reduce the cost of delivering public services for example- increased security for women travelling at night, reduced stress for commuters trying to rearrange an appointment etc.

The long-permitted concept of omnichannel, in which various distribution channels are truly integrated, is finally becoming a reality; with mobile and web gotten seamlessly connected, and automation and personalization possible with advanced analytics. These factors present a chance to take customer engagement to a new level accelerating ROI.

This article (parts 1 and 2) touches upon how to improve sales and marketing efforts of telecos via Agile and Lean Kaizen.

But, firstly, let’s take a quick look at results of telecos SWOT analysis-

One of the threats that has exposed the old way of doing telecom business is from over-the-top (OTT) players such as WhatsApp, Apple’s FaceTime and Tencent’s WeChat.

Market research data indicates that the OTT players are growing quickly and could decrease customer spending on traditional fixed and mobile communication services by up to 36%, which will put a pressure on telecos market share as well as revenues.

Improved customer engagement using a strategically structured digital marketing and sales approach, regardless of their digital maturity, will bring-in a breath of fresh oxygen for these telecos; though companies that advance their digital customer engagement will experience the biggest upside.

Moreover, this digital sales and marketing process (improvement) is likely to ring-in 10 to 40% increase in ROI in the first year of implementation. So, how to make this possible?

Here are seven salient points of digital customer engagement for telecos to generate 10- 40% ROI:
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1. Drive customer acquisition by increasing incoming traffic (via SEO) and lead conversion.
2. Transform internal processes to speed up value capture via agile marketing.
3. Drive customer value through personalized outreach and cross-sell.
4. Improve agency consolidations.
5. Manage vendor relationships.
6. Build cross-functional employee teams.
7. Build technology stack, advanced analytics, optimized targeting and personalization at scale, leveraging both internal and external data.

​To pursue such supercharged digital marketing- based customer engagement, the incumbent telecos must start out by the organization’s top leadership’s total commitment to this goal, choosing the right change management and business process improvement methodology to succeed attaining the initiative, keep the process improvement excitement brimming by appropriate employee engagement and investment into new ways of working.

Part 2 of this article series will touch upon the sales & marketing process problems (within telecos), recommended solutions, Agile and Lean Kaizen process improvement strategy to bring telecos marketing & sales up to speed and excel!

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#telecom #Lean #ProcessExcellence  #ContinuousImprovement #Kaizen  #ServiceIndustry   #Agile #AgileKaizen     #telecos #Kaizen