We all know a good digital experience when we see one. It’s fast, responsive and intuitive. It’s available on our terms, when we want it, where we want it, and on whatever device we choose. And it’s personalised to our own needs, choices, preferences and circumstances.

Buyers don’t just understand what a great experience is, they expect it whether they are buying consumer goods or enterprise data networks and services. There is intense competition and narrowing product service differentiation across the B2B telco market that covers everything from fibre to data and IP. This means customers are more likely to opt for the provider who makes it easy to determine the right technology for their solution design.

The digital experience we offer is core to our business strategy. Therefore, we’re focused on ensuring our connected industry platform is a success – driving "peer-to-peer network effects”.  The platform is designed and built to enable digital growth through channel reach and across new service applications with core telecommunications access services. To further enable this, we’re accelerating development on our platform and will continue to open our APIs for adoption by our customers.
 

The changing nature of the B2B buyer

The B2B buyers’ journey has changed dramatically in recent years. The trend of customers shopping around is amplified in the wholesale channel. Service providers have responded to their end customer buying habits by doing multiple price checks to offer ‘good, better, best’ options. A key friction point being addressed includes service availability matched to geo-location resulting in validated product and pricing outcomes. Saving time, rework and transparency on the tech solution.

We must meet the expectations among customers who want us to 'know their business model' and to be ‘more responsive’ in these digital sales experiences and the presales journey. Our ability to provide personalised B2B experiences based on commercial relationships, as well as make quoting quick and easy, with smart data to validate tech options is essential. It affects how you sell to your customers such as cost to serve, speed to market and competitive price. We see this as part of our customer experience proposition design to boost presales conversion.
 

From legacy systems to a modern marketplace for our products and services

Our expectations of how we want to interact with organisations and vendors have changed drastically – a world where digital leads. And for large telecommunications organisations with multiple, complex front and back-office legacy systems that require modernisation and simplification, this is a challenge that can’t be solved overnight.

As an industry, we’re not where we want to be. No telco has made it into KPMG’s Top 10 Australian customer experience rankings for at least three years. In our case, our legacy systems don’t support the behaviours of today’s buyers because they weren’t designed that way.

We built our systems over decades in which launching a new product meant launching a new ordering system to go with it. The result is you must use multiple disparate systems to create quotes and orders, which makes for a frustrating user experience and drawn-out process.

We also recognise for the data and IP category - feasibility results were not always accurate due to  manual processes and data validation. In our current user platform user journey, there was no real time guidance on what the available products are or what information you need to put in to get a green result for services such Ethernet Access. This often led to a poor customer experience which may have resulted in lost business for you and for us.

But we are changing - The future is bright with the use of API’S that gives us real time updates and transposed validated solution options with product, pricing and the flexibility to configure product attributes for your sales teams. 

Our T25 growth strategy puts CX at the core

T25 provides us with the strategic direction to transform the experience of working with us.

This brings two pillars of our T25 growth strategy to life geared at driving customer experience and digital first approach for the wholesale segment.

We want to be the easiest of all your vendors to work with. A partner with products and services you can integrate into your workflows with minimal effort through our platforms or API approach. A partner who you can work with in ways that suit you best, and who makes it easy for you to grow your business, while continuing to offer the great account team support you value today.
 

Our vision of a leading CX

Designing and building intuitive B2B digital experiences, enhance productivity, are personalised based on role and commercial terms, on-demand, consistent and customer designed.

Our Digital Customer Experience program is focussed on the presales journey for the data and IP services market. We will deliver a platform and through our API’s, a digital experience that is efficient and more a like a personalised shopping cart experience than a traditional B2B telco purchase. This is developed in close collaboration with IT company - Infosys. The vision is for a customer experience built around:

• A marketplace for our products, providing certainty about what’s on offer and making it easy for you to choose a solution which suits you and your customer aligned to the service qualification.
• Customer led designed approach embracing Human Centred Design across all the presales phases from research, comparison quoting to order placement.
• Simple, fast and connected tools that abstract away all the complexity of our underlying systems
• Dynamic information, including price and availability updates as you change configurations
• Streamlined quoting and ordering, with ‘green’ options highlighted where available
• Continuous improvement based on data driven decisions / feedback from users

You’ll benefit from quote wait times measured in seconds rather than days. It will be easy for you to offer a range of options, and you’ll see how and why choosing different options changes the price or delivery timeframe. And it will be faster for you to find available opportunities and default to your preferred choices through the platform. All of this will be done through simpler and smarter interactions so anyone in your team can pick up quoting and ordering.

How are we achieving our goal?

We are focusing on you, our customers, and how you work starting with one part of the value chain: the pre-sales process.  This way we can create experiential change and demonstrate real benefits by helping you make more sales.

Soon we’ll launch a completely new quoting and ordering journey for Ethernet Access fibre, before adding further products as we gain more understanding. And we’ll continue to evolve and enhance our digital customer experience, because we know that improving the way we serve you is crucial to our future success.