Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy

Chapter 9: Achieving Operational Excellence and Customer Intimacy: Enterprise Applications management system. The company wanted the most complete suite of customer relationship management with the business. The company enlisted project CRM) tools that would support multichannel and cross-channel marketing efforts. Oracle seemed directors from both business and IT departments. Representatives from sales and marketing chaired the best fit and had the most functionality built-in the technology selection committees to ensure without requiring additional modifications. Celcom that people outside of IT were making the case for enlisted Accenture consultants to manage the the project. Top management, including sales and implementation and EMC for storage technology. marketing department heads and Celcom’s CEO, are BT Group assisted with network deployment and part of a steering committee for customer experience ongoing network support management that meets every two weeks. Celcom’s transformation plan entailed retaining A group of business advocates was charged with some of Celcom’s existing systems, and the Celcom championing the causes most important to the team liked Oracle Communications’ modularity and business staff. Their connections to business depart- ments also helped expedite funding for the project interoperability as well as its cross-channel capabili- and obtain review and approval of project plans and ties. Oracle Communications is a cross-channel specifications. product suite that provides a variety of services, In addition, Celcom also replaced some telecom- including broadband data, wireless data, and mobile munications technical terms with ones that were voice services. It helps communications services more easily understood by nontechnical users. For providers such as Celcom manage and integrate example, business support systems (which included customer interactions across multiple channels applications for customer-facing business operations) to improve customer support, reduce problem were renamed the Best Sales and Service (BSS) plat- resolution time, customize marketing to narrow form. BSS conveyed the key objectives of Celcom’s market segments, and expedite time-to-market for business and technology transformation better. new products and services. Celcom understood the Celcom’s integrated systems make it possible for call center importance of cross-channel customer experiences representatives to respond much more and wanted to use this to differentiate itself from rapidly to customer queries. In the past, customer its competitors. Celcom’s systems solution enables agents needed to to toggle between two and five screens customer interactions to traverse its retail shop, to do their work. Now they work with just a single screen, which increases efficiency. Sidhu estimates online shops, call center, and partner/dealer chan- nels seamlessly. that using fewer screens cuts average call-handling time by 15 to 20 percent. BSS includes a new tablet-based app for Celcom dealers that makes signing a customer up for a new mobile phone completely paperless. New-phone activation time has been cut from two hours to two minutes. Fewer activations require manual follow- up. Celcom dealers and customers are happier. Celcom’s dealers used to be paid once ar once a month. With BSS, they can be paid twice a month and even more frequently in the future. Chong believes that just being able to pay dealers more frequently will enable Celcom to take market share from competitors. to take de facilities and dealer stores is now centralized and ma Inventory of mobile handsets at Stocs is now conta using BSS. Dealers can see what Celcom has in stock, and Celcom inventory managers can monitor stock on dealer shelves. More detailed inventory control helps Celcom move more products because governance, advising about best practice approaches it can ship fast-selling units to dealers before short- ages occur or have marketers target promotions in regions where the company wants to move specific products. This would have been impossible before. Salespeople are beginning to use big data collected in BSS to manage sales by region better. a Celcom BSS provides a single customer record, regard- less of how many services (mobile, landline, and data) and devices a customer purchases, that is populated with data from various touchpoints. By consolidating customer data into a unified customer record, Celcom can offer tailored promotion offers in real time that fit a customer’s individual history Celcom’s holistic view of a customer includes family relationships, which has special significance when marketing in Asia. The company can see every aspect of service each customer uses, which makes cross-marketing and up-selling more efficient. Celcom completed the BSS implementation in just 18 months. Celcom replaced 17 systems with one seven-module Oracle system. Oracle Communications Consulting experts played a crucial role in helping Celcom meet its customer satisfaction goals by providing strong program and working with Celcom to improve deployment speed, enhance its customer experience, and reduce operational costs. Celcom officials explicitly tried to get employees invested in the new system to ensure that it aligned and managed Part M: Key System duplicate BUSINESS PROBLEM-SOLVING CASE Customer Relationship Management Helps Celcom Become Number One Celcom Axiata Berhad (Celcom) is the oldest mobile customers by looking at SIM (subscriber identity telecommunications company in Malaysia and its modules in mobile phones) IDs. However matur largest, with a reputation for quality and reliability tomers have multiple devices and SIMs for postul that is unrivaled in that country. Nevertheless, and work uses. Celcom needed systems that cous maintaining its competitive edge has been a struggle. identify and serve each customer rather than the In 2006, Celcom dropped to third place among person’s SIMs. Otherwise, Celcom service represes Malaysian cellular providers and posted losses. Since tatives would waste valuable company and custome then, management has worked feverishly to turn the time making sense of a customer’s multiple SIM ID company around, and Celcom has regained the top scattered among various records in the system. The spot in its market. To do this required major changes company wanted to be able to see ac customer as a in the business, including a new CEO, changes to specific person, not a SIM or a number. corporate culture, and new technology and business For Celcom, customers included not only mobile processes for managing the customer experience. users but also its dealers and resellers. Celcom has To become number one in the Malaysian market nearly 30,000 channel partners who provide many again, Celcom’s senior management knew that the in-person customer services, such as handset sales company had to build better networks and market and activation. Any change in technology and busi- more aggressively, but the real key to success lay in ness processes would need to improve the customer improving the customer experience. According to experience for Celcom’s partners as well as for the : Suresh Sidhu, Celcom’s chief corporate and opera- company itself tions officer, there will always be a competitor who Celcom’s solution involved changes to the compu- can beat you on price, or even out-innovate you. ny’s technology, processes, and people. At the care is However, it’s much harder for a competitor to dis- an Oracle-based business support system (BSS) that rupt a strong, positive relationship with customers. consolidated customer records, centralized inven- Celcom believes it’s the market’s best differentiator. The Malaysia telecommi mache tory management, and sped up business processes. market quite This system consolidates customer information into mature, so there are few opportunities to acquire a single view of the customer to improve customer new customers. Customer retention is essential, as is service across online, call center, and retail channels luring customers away from competitors. Malaysia’s million is is large and diverse retail stores as which requires multiple approaches to to interacting Siebel call center with them. Older customers prefer in-person service and Oracle inventory T system agement from Celcom dealers or retail outlets, whereas Communications Order and Service Management it applications sophisticated young urban users prefer to do busi- Celcom’s chief sales and commercial officer Eric ness online. All want reliable mobile service. Chong was co-chairman along with Sidhu of the Companies such as Skype, Google, and Netflix BSS transformation. They kicked off the project by provide services that companies access over a asking two questions: What do Celcom’s business variety of networks and devices, which can disrupt users need from BSS? What traditional telecommunications billing models. For deliver to Celcom’s customers? The BSS projecte Celom to be number one in data services, it would asked approximately 700 Celcon have to build enterprise systems that would be able to collaborate with these new players. to list the top ten experiences that users and dealers tomer service, retail, marketing, and other divisions Celcom was unable to address these challenges wanted, such as fast activation, less paperwork, and because it had a siloed information technology always having the most popular phones in stock. The architecture and business processes that could not BSS transformation team then developed technical provide a complete view of customers. For instance, and business process requirements based on these customer data from one system such as billing Top 10 lists and then compared offerings from sev were not easily available to other systems such as eral vendors. inventory. This is a common problem for mobile pro- Celcom chose Oracle as the primary technol- viders because carriers have traditionally counted ogy provider for the new customer experience customer base of the Oracle portal sites and retentation included new customer well as an Oracle y man team I experiences should BSS n employees in cus 364 Part III: Key System Applications for the Digital Age Celcom now can provide a single consolidated product catalog, which helps it get products out faster to the market-another way the new system will help Celcom achieve its goal of becoming num- ber one. Celcom is now much closer to achieving its brand vision, pleasing its customers and exceeding their expectations. Sources: Jessica Sirkin, “Oracle Implementation at Celcom Brings IT, Business Together,” searchoracle.com, accessed January 17, 2015; www.celcom.com, accessed January 18, 2015; Fred Sandsmark, “Customers First,” Profit Magazine, May 2014; and Oracle Corporation, “Celcom Transforms Its Customer Experience with Industry Leading Oracle Communications Suite,” March 31, 2014. Case Study Questions 9-13 What was the problem at Celcom that was described this case? What people, organization, and technology factors contributed to this problem? 9-14 What was Celcom’s business strategy and what was the role of customer relationship manage- ment in that strategy? 9-15 Describe Celcom’s solution to its problem. What people, organization, and technology issues did the solution have to address? 9-16 How effective was this solution? How did it affect the way Celcom ran its business and its business performance? 9-17 Describe two operational activities and two business decisions that were improved by Celcom’s new CRM capabilities. MyMISLab Go to the Assignments section of your MyLab to complete these writing exercises. 9-18 What are three reasons a company would want to implement an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and two reasons it might not want to do so. 9-19 What are the sources of data for analytical CRM systems? Provide three examples of outputs from analytical CRM systems. Chapter 9 References “Social and Mobile CRM Boost Productivity by 26.4 Percent,” Destination CRM (March 8, 2012). rations and Sunnly Chain Management,