Customer focus requires a cultural change

At Digital Transformation Asia this November, the author of this article, Jacqueline Teo, Chief Digital Officer, HGC Global Communications, will be part of a panel discussing and debating how to choose the optimum strategy for OSS/BSS transformation. In this article, she shares some of her professional experiences involving the cultural angle of transformational strategy.

One of the most significant areas to impact a telco’s ability to move along the digital spectrum is its customer experience platforms, traditionally known as business support systems (BSS) and operations support systems (OSS). Most telcos are encumbered with systems that are poorly integrated, built up over years for network-based products and services. The legacy architecture, technology and processes make it incredibly difficult to pivot and innovate for digital services and models.

We feel that digital natives tend to create their business models with minimal reference points to existing practices. So in our own transformation endeavour, we started from the customer’s buying experience and designed our models around that experience.

It took (and is still taking) a lot of effort to change the way we looked at the customer, to place the customer in the centre of everything we do, to challenge ourselves on what 'great' looks like to a customer and to have the courage to adapt our current practices to new ways working. This is the hardest part of a digital transformation and requires the most strategic thinking. This is the cultural strategy.

The cultural strategy

To embed the right culture and a safe environment for learning, we created a single working group where everyone had an equal vote and say, regardless of role and level in the organization. This is similar to an Agile pod, run as a mini innovation creation centre, with processes and facilitation to grow each person’s outputs iteratively .

We would work through things as a team including challenges specific to one function, solutions that traverse several functions and even new ideas that did not reside with any one function.

What surprised everyone was that the first major decision we had to make as a group resulted in:

1. All business units independently chose the same platform partner


2. The majority of the first target processes were able to be adopted by most business units


3. Arriving at the decision took less time than a normal RFP/tender/selection would have

This meant our wider community could then create and iterate specific experiences for each of their customers as needed, with a common, standardized, platform for all.

The journey has by no means been easy. We experienced and still experience resistance.

The googlites ( I read it on google and know all I need from google), the protectors (I know my business best and don’t need help), and the reality realists (my reality is what’s real and I don’t believe in yours) exist in every telco. Then there is also a fine line to walk constantly so that we do not create decisions by consensus, can balance free opinions versus specific outcomes, and maintain empathy for current challenges without getting bogged down in them. However without investing the time and effort into a cultural strategy, your digital transformation will not yield the desired results.