Transforming the Customer Experience for Telcos - ETI
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December 8, 2020

Transforming the Customer Experience for Telcos

The following transcript has been edited for length and readability. Listen to the entire discussion here on The Broadband Bunch.  

Craig:

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of The Broadband Bunch. I’m Craig Corbin, thanks so much for joining us. Our guest today is one of the 144,000 passionate Microsoft employees around the globe dedicated to fulfilling that mission.

Craig:

Rick Lievano, serves as the Worldwide Director of Industry Technology Strategy for the Microsoft telecommunications industry, where he works to develop solutions and reference architectures to address the rapidly changing needs of telecommunications providers. Rick previously served as the Architect for the telecom industry at Microsoft Latin America and Microsoft Consulting Services in the United States. He’s led a number of application development projects for Tier One service providers across the Americas, including business support systems modernization, subscriber analytics, and contact center optimization. He also holds a TM Forum Business Development Manager Career Certification and several TM Forum Knowledge Certifications. Rick, welcome to The Broadband Bunch.

Craig:

It’s an exciting time everywhere in the world of telecommunications and especially at Microsoft, you and your team have been extremely busy. What is happening in the world of telecom from Microsoft’s perspective?

Microsoft Azure Space

Rick:

What isn’t happening? First and foremost, I hope that you heard about the exciting Azure Space announcement that we made recently.

Rick:

That’s bringing together a lot of core technologies we have and make them really applicable to space. The goal there is to make Azure the platform and the ecosystem of choice for the mission needs of the space community. It’s around enabling space connectivity and compute to be increasingly attainable across industries like agriculture, energy, and guess what, telecommunications as well. We announced a new partnership with SpaceX, we extended partnerships with other leaders like SES to provide new networking capabilities that are part of this ecosystem.

Azure Modular Datacenter

Rick:

Another cool part of that announcement was the Azure Modular Datacenter or MDC.  So, consider these data centers that are self-contained in a shipping container and you can drop them wherever you want. It really takes that [cloud computing at the intelligent] edge to the next level. Connectivity for these MDCs can be traditional land-based but could also be via satellite. These MDCs can also operate in a fully disconnected manner. It’s a really exciting new service that we offer and it brings together some of the services that we had previously announced like Azure Orbital and ExpressRoute for satellite. A lot of cool stuff happening around not only telco industry, but in space.

Microsoft Empowering Telcos

Craig:

That is exciting with regard to so many different avenues of expansion and growth in telecommunications.  A big part of that equation obviously deals with the customer experience. As telecommunications go for many over the years, customer experience has been a challenge. How is Microsoft working in that regard?

Rick:

Just to set the stage before we do a deep dive on customer experience, we really have a perspective that we want to help telcos, empower their future of insights, of experiences and of revenue growth – because that’s ultimately what they’re about. We really have five dimensions upon how we work with telcos in this area and where Microsoft really has a distinct value proposition in helping them succeed. The first is around modernizing the telco workplace by enabling secure teamwork, anywhere, anytime with intelligent collaboration and productivity tools. No other time in history has that been more relevant than today in the day of the new normal with COVID with remote work everywhere.

Rick:

So that’s been a really exciting opportunity for us, not only to help telcos modernize, become more adaptive, and allowing their employees to work from home, but telcos becoming an enabler – to enable their customers to do the same.

Telcos: the Hero Industry of COVID

Rick:

Telcos have been kind of like the hero industry of COVID because without their broadband capabilities, remote work would not have been possible. We built a whole suite of tools with Office 365, Microsoft 365, Teams and all that stuff on top of that connectivity. We work with telcos to ultimately co-market these solutions to our joint customers. Telcos are a really important part of that. They’re more than just a channel, they’re really a tight partner. The second initiative is around helping telcos streamline their business support systems. This is about simplifying all of this complexity, all these legacy systems, all the workflows, to realize the efficiencies that can be gained through intelligent processes and automation and do this on a trusted and secure cloud platform.

Rick:

That’s not only just OSS or BSS, but also your operation support systems, all the IT and all the data needs. Now the investments that we’ve made, like Affirmed, in these networks modernize their network infrastructure as well.  This brings me to the third point around helping telcos deploy and optimize their next generation networks. Be it the new 5G or private 5G networks that are out there as well as any kind of hybrid coax or fiber or whatever your next generation Software-Defined Network is, we’re going to help you run it more efficiently in an optimized manner with a lot of the investments that we’re making in the space, like Affirmed and Metaswitch, as well as some of the new edge capabilities that we recently announced.

Innovation, Growth & Enhancing the Customer Experience

Rick:

The fourth one (and we’ll get to customer experience, I promise), the fourth one is really around helping telcos accelerate their innovation and growth. They’ve been under attack for a very long time, not only from their traditional competitors, but OTT providers eating up some of their messaging and types of revenues. Voice has been a challenge over time and so they need to find new revenue sources and there it’s quite simply, let’s talk about IoT solutions that we can help them with. Let’s talk about providing an AI enabled platform where they can have this rapid development and deployment of applications that help them monetize these big investments that we’re making. Then lastly, and most importantly for this session is really around transforming the customer experience. Using all those data-driven insights and again, artificial intelligence to help telcos deliver a more personalized experience, personalized content that can help them earn these customers for life.

Craig:

Simplifying all the complexity has been a big challenge in the telecommunications industry over the years.

Rick:

Absolutely.  There’s a tremendous amount of complexity that has been built over decades. This didn’t happen overnight. One of the challenges is that we continue to do things the same way over and over without really understanding why we did those things in the first place. A couple years ago at a TM Forum event, the CTO from, I believe, KPN posed the question, “why do we even have a billing system today?” It’s like, does anybody really use the data in the billing system?

Rick:

When you look at your competitors, again looking at OTT providers, like Netflix and Spotify for example, that are providing layered data services on top of your network, do they have a billing system? They just charge your customer X dollars per month and that’s it. There’s great simplicity in that. There’s not a paper bill, you’re not sending anything anywhere. And then to pour salt on that wound, the telcos have these incredibly massive and complex billing infrastructures and charging infrastructures, yet they don’t really do anything with the data. Nobody even looks at their bill today, but yet we continue to do that because that’s what we’ve always done. In some cases, there are some regulatory challenges there. We might be forced to do some of these things, but that also says we need to change the game and go in and update and modernize, not only the thinking, the tools, but also the laws that govern some of these things that we do.

Customer Experience Analytics

Craig:

I know there are a lot of pillars on which this effort is built. Key among them, no doubt, Microsoft Dynamics. Talk a bit about that.

Rick:

Let’s talk about the pillars first because that’s also important. Transforming your customer experiences is just one little solution. It’s not a product that we sell. Like, “Here we go, let me install this or run this a web application and voila! All my problems are solved.” There are really three key elements that we feel are important when our telco customers are really trying to address or transform their customer experience. The first one is around analytics, customer experience analytics. We or telcos collect an enormous amount of data. Think about not only your BSS data upon what you have in billing and charging and CRM and all that stuff. Think about all the additional systems that are in place, all the OSS data that you collect around how the service have been utilized. The website clicks, purchase that you’ve made, customer support increase, all of the social media data that your subscribers are generating.

Rick:

What if you were able to consolidate, or at least be able to map this data together to really have a thorough understanding of your customer? Providing that mythical 360-degree view that we all cherish.

Rick:

We’ve been talking about it for over 10 years and the reality is that it’s never really a 360o but maybe a 190o view of the customer, right? It’s never really complete for many reasons. Data silos within the organization, just secure data to the point where you’re not allowed to see it, you’re not allowed to map it, OSS part of the data is kept segregated from your BSS data. You never really have that complete view. When you look at external data sources like what’s the Facebook history or the Twitter or your web browsing history, a lot of that stuff is never really contained within that 360o view. When we get to that point, the way that we’ll be able to understand customers will be tenfold what we do today. We’ll actually be able to not only provide much better experiences, better personalized experiences, but also do much better marketing. We can micro-segment the types of campaigns that we create to really be much more targeted and really be able to address the needs of your customers.

Microsoft Dynamics – Omni channel Customer Service

Rick:

The second piece where I think it’s really much more relevant to Dynamics is being able to create intelligent customer experiences that are omni-channel aware. Keeping omni channel at the forefront, but how do you really do that? What’s missing? What’s the challenge?

Rick:

Today’s CRM systems tend to be forms, rows and columns, where you enter all this information, but the CRM system is not proactive or helping you be more effective. It typically requires layers of other third-party software for you to address the various different channels that you need to support, the channels that your customers want to use. That depends on their demographic. We know that older folks prefer to make that good old-fashioned phone call to the call center. Millennials and younger folks would rather die than have to be faced with making a phone call. They’d prefer to just use Facebook messenger or Snapchat, or even an SMS, whatever to obtain support. You have to ensure that you’re addressing those needs. You also want to make sure that you’re transferring those experiences across channels. You may want to maybe start a service requests via text, but also be able to move that to maybe web chat or even a phone call seamlessly and not having to start from stage zero.

Chatbots

Rick:

Those are some of the big challenges with regards to omni-channel customer service and some of the things that we’re addressing with our Dynamics platform as well. Lastly, as part of the three elements that I talked about transforming customer experience is the mythical automated customer care agent. The chatbot. Chatbots they can have good or bad reputations depending on ultimately how you build these things. But the reality is that they can be immensely helpful in increasing your customer satisfaction ratings, your NPS, and by being able to decrease your costs by moving a lot of these simple types of Q&A questions to lower cost channels. You don’t have to have a human’s service, for example, a question on a product that’s very readily available on an FAQ site, but do so using natural language. The people feel more inclined to use that service and to use it again over time.

Rick:

And again, there are pros and cons, certainly if you put a bot out that is not very intelligent and it doesn’t really address most of your needs and it’s wrong half of the time, guess what? It’s going to earn a bad reputation, lower your NPS and never be of use again to that subscriber. You basically lost them for God knows how long.  So its worth investing a bit in creating a really, truly intelligent bot experience that understands a lot of very specific telco intents out of the box and being able to do so with natural language. That means that it could also understand different perhaps regional accents and do speech to text types of capabilities in these things as well.

Rick:

[It could also understand] different dialects based on how you type. It hasn’t been really intelligent in that regard. That’s another area we’ve invested dramatically and there are some capabilities that we’ve created inside of Dynamics 365, that let you create these bots, these chatbots almost using a SaaS, no code model. Where you can basically drag and drop and create these conversation flows very easily built on connectors to your backend systems, so they can do look-up across systems that are outside of the realm of CRM, like your billing system, for example, or others. Do so where it doesn’t require a PhD in artificial intelligence to do these things, but it’s readily available to most programmers and in fact many of these can be done by non-programmers as analysts to start creating these experiences.

Azure Bot Service

Rick:

The second point is you can also, once we want to get a little deep or more intelligent, you can layer that into a programming model. We have an entire platform called the Azure Bot Service, which the Dynamics 365 Virtual Agent capabilities are built on that really enables you to go down deeper, have a much better understanding of the intents, you can do much further integration across a greater number of backend systems that you have. And then you can also extend the channels you support. For example, we can support a number of channels for these bots out of the box, including of course, things like Teams or Facebook and many other more trivial ones, but you can also create your own ones. For example, you might want to support WhatsApp in certain industry. You may want to support SMS as a channel, so you can really plug in additional adapters or connectors for those as well.

Craig:

What you just spoke about would have the direct effect of streamlining the interaction with the customer and have a very positive impact on the bottom line for a provider.

Rick:

That’s a great point. And I might’ve mentioned this earlier, but as you develop these experiences, particularly the automated care experiences, you always have to keep NPS top of mind, right? You don’t want to develop a bad bot that ultimately has a negative impact on your NPS and so you always have to keep that in focus. There’s always best practices that you apply with regards to how you develop, deploy, and how you inform your end user, your subscriber, that they’re indeed dealing with a bot that has certain capabilities and certain limitations.

Rick:

And of course always provide the ability to pull the ripcord, right? The parachute cord and say, “Just give me a human. I just want to talk to a person because this thing is not really addressing my needs.”

Cognitive Intelligence

Rick:

Obviously, we have, I would say like a cookbook as to how you build these things and how you can do so successfully, and also depends on the level of capability that you want to include. There are some SaaS offerings based on Dynamics that really enable you to do this very easily, to a really sophisticated type of a bot experience that addresses not only perhaps your customer care needs, but really becomes an intrinsic part of your customer service experience or of your brand. You know that a lot of these bots have cool little names, we work with Vodafone, theirs is this called TOBi. So you go to TOBi and at the time you get your little service experience there.

Rick:

Another provider we work with is Telefónica in Spain. They’re a global provider obviously with 300 million plus subscribers. I’m probably misquoting that, but it’s somewhere around there. They created an intelligent bot experience a few years ago called Aura. They were one of the first ones out of the gate to go down this path. We worked with them from the very beginning, initially creating, this persona that would address some of their customer care need.  What quickly became apparent to them, it’s like, in order to do that effectively, you ultimately really have to build a cognitive intelligence layer around all the data that you have around your subscribers. You’re interacting with them in a natural language form. You need to understand your subscribers, the services they have, the types of history that we’ve collected with them in the past,  in order to really behave like a person, like a human.

Improving Customer Care

Rick:

What they found out afterwards though is, “Okay, so we address customer care, great.” You can do things like check how many minutes I have, or how much data do I have, or how much was my bill? Can I pay my bill? The typical telco intents, but they could also use the same persona, the same bot to provide new services to their subscribers, or to simplify how you connect to Telefónica services. One example is the Telefónica Wi-Fi router that you get when you establish a broadband connection with them. How many times have you gone into your router’s management configuration page, right? 192, dot 168, dot one, one, or whatever it happens to be. Who the heck knows how to do that?

Rick:

It’s crazy, but we’ve adapted to it.  “Well, that’s the way it is. You go to this crazy number that I type in my browser, and there it is, and I can kind of manage it and kind of figure out how to do that.” What Telefónica did with Aura is they provided basically some APIs on the router itself, and that could be controlled via voice, via the Aura client. For example, let’s say that you have a visitor in your home and they want to connect to your Wi-Fi. Well, you could give them the SSID that you use and your password, but you’d rather just maybe give them a temporary one to a guest one so that you could fire up Aura and say, “Aura, please allow guests to connect.” That’s it!

Rick:

And through the APIs now, the router will be configured to allow guest access to whoever just connected for a period of 24 hours. And then it expires. And so simplifying those experiences with bots is also another key value proposition. It’s not just about customer care.

Craig:

A large part of what’s going on incorporates work with your partners there at Microsoft, and so much being done to make that customer experience easier, and other developments happening all the time. What are some of the most recent developments that you can talk about?

Dynamics 365 Industry Accelerators

Rick:

Thanks for bringing up partners because we happen to have one called ETI Software. I don’t know if you’re familiar with these folks.

Rick:

We’ve been partnering with you guys for a long time. One of the most exciting things that I’ve seen come out of your R&D group is the amazing work that you’ve done, mapping the TM Forum Information Framework or the data model, the SID, to the Dynamics 365 object model, and then extending that object model as necessary. That’s amazing! That’s one of the cornerstones of some of the work that we’re doing. This other project that’s called the Dynamics 365 industry accelerators. These industry accelerators are really foundational components within Dynamics 365 and then other related products like the Microsoft Power Platform that really enable ISVs like yourselves and other solution providers to very rapidly, very quickly build industry vertical solutions on this business application stack.

Rick:

The accelerator extends what we call the common data model and include entities that are relevant to whatever industry they support. You basically have a data schema and concepts for media and entertainment, as an example. We recently released the media and entertainment industry accelerator. We’re working on accelerators for other industries as well, including telecommunications. We’ll have some announcements to make when we’re ready to do that. That really requires tight partnerships with the industry, with software companies, ISVs like yourself, like ETI Software, that can help us bring a lot of this IP (Intellectual Property) and then ultimately, we can build on that amazing work and create something that helps the community and the industry as a whole.

Craig:

We are so pleased to be a strategic partner with Microsoft. I know that things are moving at lightspeed, and you’ve constantly got things changing on a rapid basis. What’s the most interesting thing that has happened from your perspective in the last week or month?

Azure for Operators

Rick:

Azure Space is one that absolutely, we talked about that briefly, but the Azure for Operators announcement recently made, is also incredibly important and exciting for us because it means that we’re really taking the telecommunications industry front and center and absolutely making it a critical part of our overall mission and objectives. Not only did we make some critical acquisitions in the space, in the way of Affirmed and Metaswitch and of course the Edge Zone announcement, but how we’re really composing these things and putting them together.  Taking all that amazing talent from these companies we acquired, that have really deep telco expertise, the software engineers, the telecom engineers that understand the telecom industry very deeply. They know what it takes to build out these networks, to manage and maintain. They know the unique needs and SLA requirements of the industry. They bring an immense amount of telco DNA right into our Azure product groups.

Telco and Cloud

Rick:

It’s a great marriage of telco and cloud. We’re the only hyperscale provider that’s really made such a significant investment and made it a front and center part of our strategy with regards to how we address telcos. The end goal is we’re going to make Azure the carrier grade cloud. Not just a cloud that’s relevant for IT workloads and so forth, but one that’s really relevant to the most critical workloads that telcos can have, and that’s really their network and that’s where we’re going. It’s going to be a long journey, but we’re on it, we have a mission and that’s pretty exciting.

Craig:

Obviously, there are probably a number of our listeners that would love to be able to touch base with you that might have questions you could assist with. What’s the best way for them to make contact?

Rick:

Most of our customers, particularly enterprise customers have an account exec. Certainly reach out to them. I don’t want to be in the middle of that relationship, but if you want to contact the telco team at Microsoft directly, you can do so by emailing us at telcoindustry@microsoft.com, one word. You can visit our website. It’s microsoft.com/telco, or follow us on Twitter, and that’s @MSFTTelco. By all means, reach out to us, always happy to hear from our customers and partners. We can help connect you with relevant product groups and, or your account exec if you’re unaware of who that is.

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