Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale doubles NPS with cloud-based self-service

• Who: Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale & DGIT
• What: Made wholesale transactions self-service for customers
• How: By moving Vodafone Wholesale into the cloud and deploying quote-order-bill technology as well as leveraging TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework components, including Open APIs
• Results: 95% of customer interactions are now digital; NPS doubled from 30 to 63; new features, functionality and products can be launched in days rather than months.

In line with Vodafone New Zealand’s ‘digital first’ strategy for customer-centricity, and based on requests from clients, the company’s wholesale division pledged to enable customer self-service. This was a big shift away from ordering by phone, text or templated emails. The vision was that once a customer had ordered a product, they would have the tools to track the delivery of that product through to delivery and deployment at a glance. Andrew McDonald, Head of Domestic and Global Wholesale, Vodafone New Zealand, said: “We had a decision to take – to make that happen, we could either develop that capability internally or we could go out to the cloud.”

The company has also deployed DGIT Systems’ Telflow product for quote-order-bill. This means Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale’s catalog-driven cloud service can be configured to take new products to market or update existing products to make them available to customers immediately. Through converging manual legacy systems, including spreadsheets and emails, Vodafone New Zealand’s wholesale customers can gather instant quotes online as well as manage orders and inventory.

Benefits

“At least 95% of our interactions with customers are now digital,” McDonald said, including pricing, quoting, order management and queries. This is from an almost standing start where all orders were previously submitted and tracked manually. As more customers have moved over to digital transactions, Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale has quickly and easily scaled its cloud infrastructure since the self-service portal launched to cope with this growing demand. This was possible in an instant where previously it would have required time- and cost-intensive in-house development work and possible delays relating to release cycles and developer availability. “Being in the cloud enabled us to rapidly scale,” McDonald said.

Further, Vodafone New Zealand’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) has doubled from 30 before the self-service portal launched to 63 after. The company can also respond to market demands and roll out features, functionality and products faster. Recently, for instance, Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale was able to launch a new wireless broadband product for the motorhome market in days, compared to weeks or even months using legacy systems.

This is helped by the fact that integrations that have been built in the self-service platform have been designed to be reusable ‘building blocks’ for other product and service offerings, enabling even greater speed. “It's a very competitive market -- the ability to launch brand new products very quickly to respond to that is key,” McDonald said. Further benefits include reduced risk because Vodafone’s Wholesale system is delivered across multiple AWS availability zones, meaning it is not vulnerable to failures which relate to an individual location.

Lessons learned

Vodafone New Zealand’s Wholesale system is built on standardized processes and interfaces, including those from TM Forum and Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF), to support further scalability.

TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework was used to define the way solution components are built in the Vodafone NZ Wholesale architecture to achieve maximum reusability, and the cloud service uses TM Forum Open APIs for party role management, product ordering, product qualification, product catalog management, product inventory and service inventory.

TM Forum APIs, with some extensions, are also used to support the online portal so that anything in the catalog becomes available to customers through those digital channels. The APIs work for all products in the catalog beyond telco products to include IoT, managed services, etc. This standardization is important to Vodafone New Zealand’s wholesale customers who value global interoperability, McDonald says. “We plan to drive a lot more heavily into API integration with customers this year,” he said. Another lesson learned is the importance of customer communication critical when changes can be made faster than ever through cloud infrastructure. Vodafone New Zealand Wholesale now engages with key users as beta testers before rolling out significant upgrades to ensure usability, as well as constantly improving on-screen instructions. Using the cloud, it is easy to quickly spin up new instances for testing before they go live. McDonald concluded: “Just as important as the technology is working with an agile partner that that can enable cloud’s benefits. Otherwise, you could end up being able to see the advantages of what you could do but still be slow due to the wrong cultural fit.