Managed Services 2.0 It’s not what you think!

Managed services is a complex business. It involves a deep understanding of the customer’s business and their objectives, and the tenacity and ability to undertake huge, complicated projects. But the most important success factor in any managed services operation is mutual trust. Service providers around the world entrust us to improve their operations and demonstrate value day in and day out, all year round.

 Our obsession with improvement is not solely focused on our customers. At Amdocs, we constantly challenge ourselves to meet higher bars, and we strive to outdo ourselves. We feel so strongly about improvement that it has become a driving principle at Amdocs Global Strategic Sourcing (GSS), which is one reason why we are so pleased to have increased our ranking for the fifth straight year on the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals’ (IAOP’s) Global Outsourcing 100® list.

 Two years ago, Amdocs was ranked 40^th on the list. We were certainly proud to be recognized as one of the top 50 outsourcing providers in the world, especially given the fact we were competing against outsourcing providers in all verticals, but we were not satisfied. We worked hard to improve and last year we rose to number 16 on the list. This year, we continued to set our sights high and again improved – we are now ranked number 11 in the world.

 But we are still not satisfied, nor will we ever will be. Continuous improvement, both for our customers and our own organization, is always our goal. Amdocs GSS would like to thank its customers and partners for undertaking this journey with us and for working with us to help improve their customers’ experience. With your help, we will set even higher goals and work hard to achieve them this coming year.

 About the Global Outsourcing 100 list

 The top Global Outsourcing 100 ranking was announced in a special advertising section on outsourcing in the Fortune 500 issue of FORTUNE® magazine on May 23. 

 To read more click here.

Add a Comment

“Transform and Survive – Or Die”

After years of talking about the business and operational implications of serving a more connected world, service providers are finally starting to switch gears and move to more specific plans of action, spurred by declines in traditional revenue sources, rising customer demands, and fast-growing competition from non-traditional players such as Google, Facebook, and Apple.

As the pace of change accelerates, very few of these providers can afford to put off the substantial B/OSS improvements and capability development required to enable new and innovative business models. Disparate and legacy systems, along with inefficient business processes, are hurting both the top and bottom lines.

As a result, many service providers are planning to make significant changes or undergo a fundamental transformation over the next 12-18 months (according to STL Partners findings).

Managed Service Flow

Don’t Follow the Herd

Traditionally, large service providers have tried to manage thetransformation process themselves, using a variety of vendors to provide specific systems, applications, and services to support the overall change. But the costs and risks involved could cause even the most aggressive executives to hold back from getting started.

But rather than going it alone, they should consider transforming under a managed services model, which provides a more affordable, less risky, and ultimately more effective alternative.

With “managed transformation,” a strategic partner takes end-to- end accountability both for transforming critical B/OSS functions and capabilities, and for managing and optimizing them on an ongoing basis to ensure substantial and sustained business benefits.

Under this arrangement, the partner has tremendous financial incentives to ensure that the subsequent transformation creates an efficient, manageable and affordable new approach since it maintains accountability for ongoing results.

One Throat to Choke

Of course, the strategic partner may not provide every single product and service within a transformation program, but, most importantly, the partner will be fully accountable (through well defined service level commitments) for ensuring that the transformation and ongoing operations are in full compliance with service provider plans and requirements.

By assuming management and accountability of legacy and transformed operations, the partner gains much deeper insight into the business issues and processes, pain points, gaps, and requirements for change.   As a result, the transformed systems and processes are more closely aligned with enabling business outcomes, not simply meeting IT performance targets.

From “Whether” to “How”

As the pace of change continues to accelerate, service providers are less and less able to put off transformation. How to organize and manage such a transformation is fast becoming a more important question for executives than whether to attempt one at all.

As discovered by MetroPCS, under a managed transformation model, service providers can gain greater financial flexibility, lower risk, and stronger accountability for results – not to mention a compelling way forward in the race for competitive advantage.

What do you think – should service providers stick with a traditional transformation approach and cross their fingers they won’t exceed their budget and timeline?  Or extend more accountability and “skin-in-the-game” to their strategic partners through a managed transformation model?

Add a Comment

One of Amdocs GSS’ most interesting customers is Mobilicity, a Canadian Greenfield Operator in a very competitive market. What makes them most interesting is that Mobilicity took a very innovative business model for its operational and IT strategy: outsourcing virtually all of its mission-critical functions. Retaining only core selling and marketing functions, Mobilicity looked for the outsourced to the strongest outsourcing vendor in each business area to achieve rapid time to market, cost-benefits and business and operational excellence.

I recently got to spend some time with David Dobbin, President and CEO of Mobilicity, at Mobile World Congress and he was nice enough to talk to some press and analysts about Mobilicity’s outsourcing model and their engagement with Amdocs. He explained it this way: “One of the strategic foundations of our business is to concentrate on what we’re good at. We believe we are really good at selling and marketing our product, and for everything else, we looked for partners that are the premier experts in those areas.”

The main reasons Mobilicity had to take this approach were the highly competitive Canadian wireless market -- dominated by giants like Bell, Telus and Rogers -- the need for a very short time to market and the urge to be price competitive.  As Dave says, “We needed to have a strong presence immediately to make a ‘bang,’ so we teamed up with partners who are really big and really great at what they do.”

The benefits Mobilicity achieved through this strategy are phenomenal:

• Time to market -- Mobilicity was providing service in only five months
• Customer experience -- A customer’s phone is activated in only five minutes (compared to the competition’s 40 minute timeframe)
• A world class IT operation -- with minimum investment
• Cost benefit -- When you do a return on investment analysis, on functions of your business, outsourcing makes sense because you get economy of scale from the outsource provider that a service provider wouldn’t get on their own, especially a Greenfield.
• Competence -- outsourcing partners who have great experience, great skill set that they can bring to Mobilicity’s business and actually make Mobilicity better than they would have been on their own.

And here’s another thing Dave had to say, which I thought was particularly interesting. “While competence and experience are fundamental to choosing the right outsourcing partners the critical issue is identifying the best vendor for each business area. A partner with great experience and a great skill set makes our business even better. A large partner enables us to act and operate as if we were a much larger company. But it’s not just about adding people; it’s adding the right people with established processes and tools and the best proven expertise for each particular business capability”.

Amdocs is one of Mobilicity’s major outsourcing partners managing Mobilicity’s Business Support Systems (BSS) and third-party sales and enterprise systems under one Managed Services umbrella with Amdocs Global Strategic Sourcing (GSS). “Amdocs manages quite literally nearly every piece of IT in our business providing cost benefits and time-to-market advantages.” Dave’s words, not ours

Mobilicity’s network was constructed by Ericsson, and other vendors are operating Mobilicity’s call center and customer service, handset distribution and logistics and backhaul network and data center.

I’ve quoted Dave a lot in this blog, but if you want to hear him for yourself, go ahead and check out this video of him talking about Mobilicity’s engagement with Amdocs

You can read more about Mobilicity’s outsourcing engagement with Amdocs in the full Mobilicity case study.

See 3 Comments / Add a comment

In my last post, I tried to cover some of the customer experience challenges service providers are facing and why Managed Services make sense as an approach to tackling those challenges.  In this installment I want to give some pointers on how best to work with a Managed Services provider in order to make sure that the end-customer’s experience is actually positively impacted. I’ll also talk a bit about some criteria for choosing the right partner to achieve this.

One example of a KPI model

Improving customer experience through managed services is based on a process which starts with mapping the customer experience related processes, the underlying systems, integration touch points, and the measurable impact on the end customer. Once you have that all mapped out, you can create comprehensive performance measurements (KPI’s) and service level targets that the managed services provider should be held accountable for as a single point of accountability.

Drilling down just a little bit, the key steps to the process include:

1. Identifying desired business outcomes
2. Identifying customer experience impacts and operational goals – Translate the customer experience impacts into the operational processes that can be improved or optimized to achieve the desired business objective
3. Building KPI models – Decompose operational goals into operational KPIs that will be targeted for improvement
4. Defining performance targets and commitment periods – Establish performance baselines, target achievement levels, commitment periods, and associated bonus and penalties
5. Developing service level improvement and optimization plans – Work with your managed services partner to develop a schedule and set of activities to improve and optimize operational SLAs over a defined period of time
6. Monitoring, Measuring, and Reviewing – Work with the managed services partner to generate frequent reporting/dashboards and set formal periodic reviews to measure the plan impacts to the customer experience; implement improvement plans as required.

By following this process, you have ensured that your managed services engagement is one that keeps the customer experience top of mind, rather than focusing solely on cost reduction.

Now that we’ve discussed the concept of using managed services to improve customer experience and some of the key points in the process to ensure that improvement, it’s time to talk about choosing a Managed Services partner. Certainly, choosing a managed services partner is a difficult decision at the best of times. But adding customer experience requirements to the mix will make that decision all the more complicated.  So I’ve put together a list of seven essential criteria that a Service Provider should consider when looking for a managed service partner that can ensure customer experience success:

• Industry Knowledge and Vision: Does the partner show deep understanding of what’s happening in the communications business, and have a vision for how service providers can meet continually rising customer demand and expectations to ensure a superior customer experience?
• Knowledge of Your Business: Beyond general industry knowledge, do they know your business, your customers, and your partner ecosystem? Do they have a good feel for your culture and what makes you special and different?
• Focus on Business Impact and KPIs: Are they truly focused on improving the customer experience in meaningful ways with clear KPIs and effective forms of recourse and resolution if they fail to meet agreed targets?
• Best-of-Breed Technology AND Integration Capability: Technology is only part of a managed services solutions, but having the best is still essential. Can the partner deploy the latest customer-centric systems, tools, and processes – and customize and integrate to your environment with high confidence and minimal risk?
• Collaborative and Flexible Approach: To what extent do they emphasize collaborative development and operational agility—and the methodology and evidence to back up their claims?
• Phased Approach to Value: Customer and competitive pressures mean that managed services partners cannot take a year or two to deliver real value; do they offer a phased approach tangible near-term benefits for end customers even as they ramp up more substantial changes that create more substantial longer term value?
• Proven Record: Has the company succeeded with managed services for customer experience before—and will they provide specific program managers and team leaders that themselves have delivered excellent results?

If you’re managed services candidate can say Yes to all of those questions, you’ve got yourself a partner in driving a superior customer experience for your customers.

You can read more about this topic in our recent whitepaper: “Using Managed Services to Enhance the Customer Experience”

Add a Comment

Imagine this scenario: you get your phone bill from your service provider. You see that you have been charged for services you never signed up for. You call Customer Service, patiently listening to Paul Anka singing “You Are My Destiny”, only to hear the CSR sadly inform you that their “system is down”. After several additional attempts, you get through to someone who is glad to assist you, investigates the problem, and gives you a refund on your next bill. Sounds good? The following month’s bill comes in, and you are shocked to find that no refund has been given. And the same problem you originally complained about is still reflected on your statement!

If you think that Managed Services has nothing to do with this scenario, think again….

We’ve come to expect a lot from our service providers. They need to offer me the newest technology, the highest quality of service and a flawless customer experience, otherwise I might check out one of the other vendors (and those are coming from every direction) that claim to offer the same service but better. That means that service providers today have little choice but to invest in the customer experience.

And if you’re a service provider, where do you start? Every step in the customer lifecycle is a link in the chain of the customer experience, so they have to get it right across all channels at every stage of the relationship. Making this happen, of course, is not easy. Success rests heavily on the right systems, processes, governance, and continuous improvement.

The Customer Experience Lifecycle

Often times service providers will try to meet this challenge using a combination of in-house resources and point solutions from different vendors to optimize their customer experience systems. However, the results often fall short.

And when you fall short on processes for marketing, sales, service, and support you get uneven service operations and an inconsistent customer experience across different channels; not to mention costly workarounds.

So the customers suffer from service interruptions, long billing cycles, slow resolution for service queries, unfriendly tools and problems ordering and using their new products and services. And the service provider suffer from unhappy customers.

This blog is about managed services so obviously I am going to suggest a managed services solution to the problem I just described.  You see, although most discussion about the benefit of Managed Services has centered on cost control, I’d like to suggest that working with a managed services partner provides a compelling solution to the problem of delivering a superior customer experience.

And I’m not alone. A growing number of service providers are starting to look to managed services partnerships as opportunities to enhance the customer experience as well – not just save a buck or two. The reason being, that with managed services, service providers can take advantage of four critical enablers of the customer experience that are often hard to develop and optimize internally:

• Global best practices and methodologies
• Customer experience-focused tools
• Business process automation and optimization
• Systems innovation

Done right, managed services can deliver substantial benefits around the customer experience.

• Increased Reliability
• Improved Quality
• Enhanced Choice
• Accelerated Innovation and Time to Market

So, how do you make sure it is done right?

Well that is the subject of a whole other blog.  In my next blog in the series I will give some more details on ways to make sure a managed service engagement is actually impacting the customer experience. You can also cheat and read more about this subject in our recent whitepaper: “Using Managed Services to Enhance the Customer Experience”

Until next time.

See 4 Comments / Add a comment