oracle whitepaperenabling a differentiated enterprise customer experience –a solutions-based...

Enabling a Differentiated Enterprise Customer Experience – A Solutions-Based Approach

An Oracle White Paper

July 2012



Executive Overview ........................................................................... 1

The Enterprise Market Opportunity .................................................... 1

The Analyst Perspective .................................................................... 2

Oracle’s View of the Enterprise CE Lifecycle ..................................... 3

First Step – Defining Your Enterprise CE Strategy ............................ 3

The Need for a Holistic, Flexible, Solution-Based Approach .............. 4

What’s Achievable – Addressing Key CE-Impacting Business KPIs .. 5

Balancing CE with Customer Profitability ........................................... 7

Partnering with Oracle to Enable a Differentiated Enterprise CE ....... 8


1

Executive Overview

Enabling an empowered customer experience (CE) for enterprise customers is critical to

growing the top line, yet enterprise customer’s business expectations – often set by consumer

experiences in other industries like retail and finance – are not being met. This deficit provides

Communications Service Providers (CSPs) with a unique opportunity to differentiate their

brand and grow their enterprise market share.

This paper outlines the market opportunity and the analyst view of what is required to succeed

with enterprise customers. It then discusses how a solutions-based approach can deliver on

these requirements, key performance indicators (KPIs) that are achievable and how CSPs can

also maximize enterprise customer profitability as part of the overall business strategy.

The Enterprise Market Opportunity

With consumer revenues flattening, CSPs are focusing on the enterprise segment to

accelerate their business and financial growth. Ovum forecasts that service revenues from

enterprise services alone will exceed USD280 billion by 2015 with:

• 28% Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) from Managed and Hosted IT services

• 13% CAGR from Carrier Ethernet

• 25% CAGR from SME Cloud services

To capitalize on this opportunity, CSPs need the right platforms. Rapid growth in enterprise

services drives the need to scale efficiently, support rapid time-to-market for next-generation

services and enable converged offers seamlessly.


2

The Analyst Perspective

What is required to succeed? Telecommunications analyst firm Ovum states the following in

their white paper “Improving the customer experience for the enterprise segment” (July 2012):

• “Enterprise customers challenge their CSPs to address the current CE deficit by improving

the levels of service and support to deliver greater business benefits. In response, CSPs

must standardize and unify systems, and deploy automated and software-driven business

processes. The outcome will deliver tangible benefits internally, assure future revenue

streams and improve the customer experience for the valuable enterprise segment.”

• “A single platform will deliver the unified view of services and customer data, whilst

automating key touch points in the customer lifecycle will allow accurate order capture,

faster processing and offer design and delivery and coordinated customer support across

multiple channels.”

• “Operators can at the same time enhance the enterprise CE and business model if they

focus on improving product profitability through on-demand bundling, reducing the cost of

sale, and improving the order-to-cash time.”


3

Oracle’s View of the Enterprise CE Lifecycle

A positive enterprise customer experience is the biggest driver of top line enterprise services revenue

growth. As shown in Figure 1, the enterprise CE lifecycle involves multiple and ongoing interactions

between the enterprise and the CSP during both the buying and owning stages. By exceeding

expectations at each touch point, CSPs can enable a virtuous circle of continuous upselling for existing

business customers as well as drive new business customers to the brand through positive testimonials.

Figure 1: Enterprise Customer Lifecycle Touch Points

Telecoms and connected IT services are business enablers for enterprises. As such, enterprises are

looking for a flexible, responsive and partnership-based relationship with the CSP that can address all

their current and emerging needs.

First Step – Defining Your Enterprise CE Strategy

Before looking at IT investments, CSPs need to first define their enterprise CE strategy. What are our

top five CE objectives? How do they differ between consumer, SME, large enterprise, industry

verticals and wholesale segments? This analysis will define the priorities; highlight where there is

overlap and need for specialization; and in turn identify the business processes and IT platform

requirements needed to support the strategy.


4

Next steps involve drilling deeper to shape the plan:

• Frame the problem of the enterprise CE deficit within the context of the customer lifecycle touch

points: buying (identifying a need, researching, selecting and purchasing) and owning (receiving,

using, maintaining and recommending).

• Identify what are the key enterprise requirements for each phase. You can then translate these

requirements into specific enterprise CE KPIs that can be measured.

• Identify the barriers preventing you from addressing the enterprise CE requirements. This requires

an analysis of systems, people (skills) and process contributing to the enterprise CE deficit.

• Identify top-level business processes required to improve enterprise CE. You can then determine the

appropriate systems, organizational structure and skills required to enable the new, more customer-

centric approach.

• Identify quantifiable enterprise CE and business benefits that will be realized. These benefits provide

the business and financial justification for moving forward with the action plan.

Through this analysis, the CSP can ensure a holistic and aligned approach, while at the same time target

the highest priority areas first where the CE and business pay offs are the greatest.

The Need for a Holistic, Flexible, Solution-Based Approach

Once CSPs have outlined their enterprise CE strategy, they need to identify the right platform to

succeed. The platform needs to support a holistic approach given:

• the overlap between consumer, enterprise and wholesale market segments and services

• the need to balance CE objectives with other key business requirements such as maximizing

customer profitability and reducing costs

Through a solutions-based platform, as shown in Figure 2, CSPs can enable key end-to-end customer-

centric and business-driven processes, including:

• Concept-to-cash

• Lead-to-quote

• Quote-to-order

• Order-to-cash

• End-to-end customer lifecycle management


5

Figure 2: Oracle’s End-to-End Solutions-based Approach

A solutions-based approach provides a common set of tools and language for

• Ensuring a common understanding of the account across all teams and channels

• Driving much greater organizational alignment around key customer-impacting business processes

To ensure flexibility and business agility, the platform must be:

• Modular to ensure that the CSP can flexibly target their highest pain points first as well as leverage

legacy investments when appropriate

• Standards-based and software-driven (i.e. favor configuration over coding) to future-proof IT

investments and deliver much greater business agility, process optimization and re-use.

Benefits of Oracle’s flexible, software-driven solutions-based approach are outlined in the next section.

What’s Achievable – Addressing Key CE-Impacting Business KPIs

To get started, CSPs need to identify which CE-impacting business KPIs are essential to their business

and then prioritize them. Table 1 identifies key business KPIs for improving the CE, explains why they

are important to both enterprises and the CSP, and highlights benchmarks that are achievable with the

right approach.


6

TABLE 1: TOP 10 CE-IMPACTING BUSINESS KPIS

CX-IMPACTING

BUSINESS KPIS

ENTERPRISE REQUIREMENTS CSP BUSINESS VALUE INDUSTRY

AVERAGE

WITH ORACLE

Bring Products to

Market Quickly

“We want to deal with a

market leader and leverage

the latest technologies to

drive new competitive

advantage.”

• Upselling to existing

customers

• Attracts new customers to

the brand

• Competitive differentiation

Months Days/Weeks

Create Custom

Bundles

On-Demand

“We have unique

requirements that are

continually changing. We

only want to pay for what we

need.”

• New revenue streams

• Faster revenue recognition

• Strategic customer

relationship

Days/Weeks Minutes/Hours

Flexible, Cross-

Channel Support

“We want to decide how and

when to interact with our

communications partner.”

• Multiple touch points

enhances revenue potential

• Faster resolution, low-cost

channels lower costs

Channel-

dependent view of

account

Takes hours/days

to cross-reference

multiple records.

Single view of the

account across all

channels

Seconds/minutes

to access common

records.

Reduce Sales

Quotation Time

(Lead to Quote

Time)

“We need to reduce the time

and cost in selecting and

purchasing complex ICT

services.“


• Reduces the cost of sale

Weeks/Months Minutes/Hours

/Days

Improve Order

Capture Accuracy

(Right First Time)

“Our communications partner

must turn up our services on

time and as promised.

Unforeseen down-time can

cost our business money.”

• RFT critical to CX

• Reduces order fall-out costs

Fall-out rates of

30%-50%

99.9% Right First

Time

Support In-Flight

Order Changes

“Updates to our orders are

the norm. They shouldn’t cost

our business time or to go to

the back of the queue and

delay our commercial plans.”


• Increases contract

profitability

Days – Requires

cancelling and re-

submitting order

Minutes/Hours

Reduce Order

Cycle Time

“We need these services now

to support revenue-

generation, reduce costly

down-time and retain our

competitive position.”


• Phased billing for long-lived

orders

• Lower OPEX

Days/Weeks

/Months

Minutes for on-net

services and soft

changes to

complex services

(IP VPNs)


7

CX-IMPACTING

BUSINESS KPIS

ENTERPRISE REQUIREMENTS CSP BUSINESS VALUE INDUSTRY

AVERAGE

WITH ORACLE

Provide Web-

based

Self-Care

“We need self-care so we

can update services on-

demand and ensure

predictable costs.”

• New revenue potential (i.e.

iVPN BoD)

• Fast, low-cost resolution

resolution to common

requests

Limited to basic

functions, swivel

chair self-care for

complex services

Supports IP VPN

Bandwidth on

Demand showing

commercial cost

Meet Delivery

SLAs

“Down-time is costly. We

need guarantees that our

services will be delivered on

time and as promised.”

• Reduces contract risk

• Competitive differentiation

Network-centric

SLAs focused on

network issues

Business-centric

SLAs covering

customer lifecycle

Predictable and

Accurate Billing

“We need predictable costs

and confidence that the bill is

accurate. Billing disputes is

costly to our business.”

• Reduces churn/ costs

related to bill

shock/disputes

• Faster bill payment

improves cash flow

• Reduces revenue leakage

60% of support

requests are

billing issues

<20% of support

requests are

billing requests

Balancing CE with Customer Profitability

Finally, many CSPs have won large multi-million dollar enterprise contracts only to later record a loss

due to lack of visibility, flawed costing processes and the inability to efficiently manage the complexity

of highly custom, long-lived orders. CSPs must look at how to enable CE while at the same time

control costs and minimize risk to ensure overall profitability and healthy margin growth.

TABLE 2: MAXIMIZING ENTERPRISE CUSTOMER PROFITABILITY

KEY PROFITABILITY

KPIS

REQUIREMENTS

Product

Profitability

• A modular product model that enables flexible and low-cost repackaging of product variants for different

verticals and business markets

Cost of Sale • Strong governance for sales operations, including full visibility of sales costs required for deal closure

Contract

Profitability

• Tools to measure contract profitability, including accurate bid costing , margin analysis for each quote and

visibility on sales compensation to third party suppliers and partners

• Strong governance for service delivery, including project-costing for long-lived orders


8

KEY PROFITABILITY

KPIS

REQUIREMENTS

Order-to-Cash

Time

• Accurate order capture (RFT) to avoid time-consuming errors and billing disputes

• Flow-through automation for complex, converged orders including IP/Ethernet VPNs

• E2e order view to identify bottleneck and enable process optimization

• Multi-phased billing for bundled, long-lived orders including multi-site VPNs

Partnering with Oracle to Enable a Differentiated Enterprise CE

As CSPs focus on the enterprise segment to accelerate growth, they need to move quickly and astutely

to make the right investments to grow revenues in an increasingly competitive market. This requires

working with a trusted partner. Only Oracle has

• A comprehensive end-to-end solution that delivers a world class customer experience across

the entire customer lifecycle

• A flexible, software-driven and solutions-based platform designed to enable customer-

centricity, business agility, process optimization, order transparency and re-use

• Extensive experience in enabling enterprise offers for multiple enterprise markets

• Leads the market in setting industry benchmarks for key enterprise services business KPIs

As a next step, CSPs should contact their Oracle representative to set up consultative workshop to

discuss your business objectives and requirements in more detail.


9

White Paper Title

[Month] 2012

Author: [OPTIONAL]

Contributing Authors: [OPTIONAL]

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oracle whitepaperenabling a differentiated enterprise customer experience –a solutions-based...

Technology

enterprise ce deficit

enterprise ce strategy

impacting business kpis

customer experience

based approach

enterprise

business

support