DIGICEL CASE STUDY - Digicel Group (Digicel)  - Customer Services Transformation

BACKGROUND

Digicel is a mobile phone network and home entertainment provider. They provide services to almost 14 million customers, operating in 33 markets across the Caribbean, Latin America, and Oceania regions. 

VISION Consulting (VISION) was approached by Digicel to help transform their core voice services operations – which had been experiencing diminishing returns for several years. Customer Service Agents were fielding more than 19 million calls per annum.

CHALLENGES & OPPORTUNITIES

To maintain profitability and competitiveness, Digicel needed to achieve a global transformation of their organisation across its 33 markets. 

The transformed business model needed to include:

1. A completely new communications network with a “quad play” offer to customers of mobile, fixed voice, broadband, and entertainment services.

2. Moving customer service call centres to self-service models.

3. Cutting Customer Service cost-to-serve by 50% and increasing revenues.  

VISION APPROACH

VISION had experience working with Digicel across several smaller scale projects. They had built a strong understanding of the organisation culture and operating models. This relationship, combined with their experience working in the contact centre environment across other multinational clients, made VISION the ideal partner to help transform Digicel’s business.

Through VISION’s research, a forced migration model, delivered at pace, was the only option to achieve the goals in the timescales.

SERVICE DELIVERY

Diagnosis  

To implement the programme, VISION determined that it would be necessary to deliver five workstreams in parallel: 

As part of determining key customer and user personas, VISION carried out detailed ticket analysis, interviews with call centre personnel and customer surveys which revealed that customers called for an unusually wide range of reasons. The team did not see any ‘low hanging fruit’ issues which, if eliminated, would see a significant reduction in calls. Instead, customers were in a practice of using Digicel customer care as a ‘catch all’ service for all types of problem resolutions.

The conclusion was that the best opportunity for achieving call reduction was to 

migrate customers to self-service. By comparing notes with VimpelCom (a telco also shifting to self-service) which started a similar process a year earlier, and conducted research at Oracle, Bank of Ireland, and Ryanair, the findings indicated that achieving the required call reduction would not be achievable within the required timescale without ‘forcing’ a significant portion of customers to self-serve. 

The team presented a business case for forced self-service which would reserve the option to speak to an Agent, via inbound call, for a portion of high revenue prepaid customers, post-paid customers, and corporate customers. All other customers would be diverted to self-service channels and, if necessary, Webchat. 

Also identified was that a significant percentage of customers in these markets did not have smartphones and could not be expected to avail of online self-service functionality, this made it imperative that these customers would also have inbound access to Agents until additional support could be provided to them via a UMM texting channel.

Design

VISION designed the end-to-end ‘To Be’ customer conversation, beginning in the IVR and diverting the customer, depending on their issue to the App, a content management system, to social media, or operational systems. Digicel provided various channels for customers to use, but the channels were distinct and separate with no unifying conversation journey for customers to follow. The team unified these channels into a single, seamless conversation that would bring customers in a single journey across channels to where they could best resolve their query. 

The analysis broadly categorised customer queries into ‘transactional’ and ‘information’ requests. . Almost half of the 35 transactional activities identified could only be completed successfully with the assistance of an Agent.   The team then mapped out the remaining customers identified which of these could be provided in self-service channels and designed the user digital journey prototypes for the ‘to be’ self-service process in various channels (IVR, App, UMM (texting solution) and web).  

The existing channels were not used by customers for self-service by creating simplified design specifications for the UMM and three new IVRs which would serve post-paid, prepaid High-Value, and prepaid Low-Value customers. Customers would be directed to the appropriate IVR based on an algorithm designed by VISION.  

Upon reviewing the Digicel website the team concluded it did not provide customers with the content required to satisfy information queries. By partnering with a best-in-class supplier, Zendesk, to create an online content resource from scratch. The structure of the new content resource and user experience design and wireframes was designed by VISION, with content created by Digicel staff, under VISION management.

Implementation

VISION’s technical consultants reviewed and facilitated decision making with Digicel IT and their executive team in deciding the technical solution designs. Once agreed, the new technology was piloted in two of the smaller markets (Grenada and St. Kitts) where the team implemented the ‘alpha’ designs. 

By monitoring customer reaction daily via outbound surveys and ticket analysis it was found that a poor self-service resolution rate was far more closely associated with churn than low Net Promotor Score (NPS). 

VISION also found was that successful resolution depended on menus of fewer than 5 items and which required no more than 8 seconds per item.  These findings also showed that adoption of change generally took three months and that high-profit prepaid customers adopted most quickly.  

The team noted that customers of all classifications (highly profitable prepaid, low profitability prepaid, and post-paid customers) used the older UMM (texting) technology.  This also lead to finding that with forced migration, webchat traffic increased but more in response to marketing than in the individual’s inability to get to agents.  The model showed that a simple IVR and simple texting system would provide the best self-service experience with the least churn.

OUTCOMES

Taking these learnings and implementing a refined ‘beta’ design of the technology across the remaining 30 countries. Furthermore by consolidating 24 call centres to five, and implemented a new operating model (designed by VISION) then cutting the Customer Service cost-to-serve by more than 40%

VISION managed the development, testing, and implementation of all new technologies over this time period.

Throughout the implementation, the team tracked inbound calls, escalations, webchats and foot traffic in stores from all markets. As part of the agreed reporting framework they captured the data in a financial model which measured the effect of the new technology and allowed to track and forecast monthly headcount reduction per market.

VISION continued to survey customers in each market daily, identified self-service problems, and set up a two-week continuous improvement cycle for problem identification, solution design, and deployment.  They focused on usability (the rate at which customers resolved their issues on self-service) and NPS.  

Continuous improvement and unity with customers were central aims. In the six months following initial implementation, improvements to self-service channels and growing understanding by customers of the new channels had raised first time resolution from 40% in the initial markets to 60%. Subsequently, none of the other markets performed at less than 50%.

CONTRACT MANAGEMENT

VISION appointed a Director from within their firm to lead the assignment and to hold ultimate responsibility for the quality of the deliverables and an experienced manager to take day-to-day responsibility for the operational aspects of the project and to ensure that all KPIs were defined and adhered to.

They established a collaborative working relationship, with clear communication protocols that actively support and enhance our relationship with Digicel. 

Focusing  on delivering clear contract management procedures, including:

The VISION contract manager ensured on-going monitoring and control of performance and the quality of services delivered measuring the services actually delivered against agreed commitments. 

To ensure transparency on the standard of the services supplied against the KPIs, they provided monthly progress reports and held regular meetings with stakeholders to discuss progress, issues and lessons learnt. 

Digicel required a flexible and responsive service, VISION implemented a formal communications channel with associated response times so that requests were known to all team members and that there was focus on responding in time. 

The VISION team implemented a quality control programme that incorporated checklists, supervision within teams and signoff by the account director. This was complemented with client reviews and feedback and the continuous learning process. 

The team was drawn from across the VISION business and was selected for their experience in working in collaborative client environments and with both  internal and third-party resources. They  delivered excellent coordination and efficiency by:

CONTRACT PERFORMANCE

OUTCOMES

The Consolidation Programme was highly successful and met the target of transformation within 2017. Within the first year, VISION delivered:

• Savings of $12 million a year, $1 million over target.

• A reduction of 7.5 million calls. 

• An NPS score that reduced in some markets by less than ten points, and surprisingly improved in some markets. There was little evidence of service-related customer churn in any market.

The programme surpassed initial expectations in a highly dynamic environment. VISION helped to transform Digicel’s operation into a much leaner, customer centric, high-performing organisation.