Digital Telco Leaders Excel in Customer Experience and Efficiency

BARCELONA, February 22, 2018 - Digital leaders in the telecoms industry achieve better-quality interactions with their customers even as they do less work, according to the first results of the Oliver Wyman Digital Telco Index.

Launched in early 2017, the index measures the degree to which telcos have so far digitized their operations and customer interactions. It has now been applied to multiple international telecom operators, with the following results:

• Digital leaders register three times the number of customer-care interactions as digital laggards, but 90 percent of these are zero-touch – involving no employee.
• As a result, leaders report half the number of employee-assisted interactions and function with customer-care teams one third the size.
• Leaders have apps with rich service management and control features. Their customers are four times as likely to download and use the apps than laggards’ customers.
• As a result of their company-wide digitization, leaders have half the number of employees for every million customers.

The Digital Telco Index was set up because of the large expected impact of digital technologies on telecommunications. The extent of the transformation will make it complex, touching on almost every aspect of telecoms providers’ businesses. So, a major challenge will be to figure out how far different parts of a company have progressed in digitization and which are running into roadblocks.

The index measures progress towards Oliver Wyman’s vision of a future digital telecoms company. It is based on 70 key performance indicators, which are used to measure digitization in 10 dimensions: Five are related to customer experience, such as “easy service management”; and five, including “agile workforce and culture,” are related to the company’s operational model.

Other findings are as follows:

Client Interaction

• Leaders have launched online communities as part of their customer care efforts, and a third of their customers are active on them every month.
• E-billing has been taken up by 95 percent of digital leaders’ customers, compared to around 20 percent for laggards.

App Usage

• Apps are used for service management, such as activation, suspension and even cancellation, as well as plan customization. They also include advanced spend control features, such as capping configurations and auto top-up rules.
• Thanks to their superior service management features, 65 percent of leaders’ customers use them, compared with just 20 percent of laggards’ customers.
• Laggards’ apps are limited to common features that track spending and sell top-ups and add-ons.

Workforce And Productivity

• Digital leaders apply agile principles to more than 60 percent of company projects.
• They have 10 times the number of employees working on digital-related jobs such as digital marketing, data science, and digital customer care. Employees get four times the number of hours training on digital capabilities.

One of the aims of the Digital Telco Index is to let operators see how far they have digitized various activities and parts of their organizations. This should help them target areas for action, so that they can accelerate and prioritize their digitization. The index gives the heaviest weightings to the most important aspects of digitization and can be updated frequently: The data points can be easily collected in four weeks or less, allowing telecoms operators to track their progress. Moreover, telcos can compare themselves to their peers and figure out whether and in what areas they are ahead of the competition – and where they are falling behind.

About Oliver Wyman

Oliver Wyman is a global leader in management consulting. With offices in 50+ cities across nearly 30 countries, Oliver Wyman combines deep industry knowledge with specialized expertise in strategy, operations, risk management, and organization transformation. The firm has more than 4,700 professionals around the world who help clients optimize their business, improve their operations and risk profile, and accelerate their organizational performance to seize the most attractive opportunities. Oliver Wyman is a wholly owned subsidiary of Marsh & McLennan Companies [NYSE: MMC]. For more information, visit www.oliverwyman.com. Follow Oliver Wyman on Twitter @OliverWyman.